Mark Reviews Movies: VIVARIUM

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 26, 2020

Just beneath the surface of Vivarium, there's a broad satire of how rigid, repetitive, and ultimately meaningless life can become within the grind of daily living. Writer Garret Shanley and director Lorcan Finnegan's movie is a pretty nihilistic one, and if it weren't so focused on creating puzzles and showing us how empty life is in the big picture of things, it might have provided itself an actual chance to say something.

Instead, though, the movie is all about its surfaces and repeatedly hinting that there's deeper beneath them. The primary surface is an apparently idyllic suburban sprawl called Yonder, where all of the houses—row after row after seemingly endless row of them—are of the same basic construction and sickly green color, while the sky above is littered with unnaturally cloud-shaped puffs.

That's where Gemma (Imogen Poots), a teacher, and her boyfriend Tom (Jesse Eisenberg), a landscaper, have decided to look for a starter home. The real estate agent is the strange Martin (Jonathan Aris), who gives them a tour of the house and disappears without warning.

Gemma and Tom find it impossible to navigate out of the subdivision by car or on foot, and every day, a box of food arrives on the street. One day, the box contains a baby and a message: If they raise the child, they can leave.

Things become weirder and weirder. The baby grows up into a boy (played by Senan Jennings) in a matter of months. He offers a deafening screams whenever he wants something. A patch of the front lawn burns away from a flicked cigarette, and Tom begins digging into the muck beneath, hoping to find a way to escape. Meanwhile, the relationship between Gemma and Tom, who fall into mindless routines ("raising" the boy and digging a hole), becomes strained.

The superficial point of this is almost too obvious to put into words, but the simplicity of the filmmakers' sardonic dissection of suburban life is somewhat bolstered by Finnegan's consistently subversive aesthetics. There's an undeniably eerie atmosphere to the movie, especially in the early stages of the mystery.

That doesn't last for long, though, and Vivarium gradually reveals that it only has layers of mystery to add and to quickly pick apart during the climax. The movie exists solely as a puzzle, with an answer that's as obvious as it is self-contained.

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