A young couple go house hunting in a new suburban development and soon discover that they cannot leave in Vivarium, a nifty little Twilight Zone like riff screened as part of this year’s Future Gate film festival in Prague.
Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg (who also starred together in 2019’s excellent The Art of Self-Defense) are Gemma and Tom, a schoolteacher and handyman who wander into the storefront of explicitly creepy real estate agent Martin (Jonathan Aris) while house hunting.
It’s clear from the outset that something’s off about this agent, but the young couple follow him into a new suburban development anyway. Only problem: after Martin disappears on them, they can’t get out.
Every house looks exactly the same, and all roads lead back to the same location. After an entire night spent trying to drive their way out of this suburban hellscape, Gemma and Tom find themselves right back to where they started, the car now out of gas. When even trying to burn the houses down doesn’t work, the couple realizes that something beyond their grasp of understanding is afoot.
While this setup is perfect for a 40-minute TV production along the lines of a Black Mirror, the prospect of sitting through another hour-plus of Vivarium seems daunting after this premise has been cleanly outlined within the film’s first twenty or so minutes. Not only do we know what’s up, but we also know the movie isn’t playing by rational rules, so the likelihood of a logical resolution is about nil.
But writer-director Lorcan Finnegan throws a twist into the mix with the appearance of The Boy (played initially by Senan Jennings, and later Eanna Hardwicke), a baby in a box left outside their new home with the instructions “raise the child and earn your release.”
As Vivarium progresses, it becomes less about figuring out how Gemma and Tom will escape from this Kafkaesque nightmare (or even what, exactly, is going on) and more about how they adjust to their newfound life as unwilling caretakers for an inhuman monster. It’s in this regard that Vivarium most pointedly succeeds, working not only in its own weird terms but also as a twisted analogy for parenthood in suburbia.
Equipped with a strong visual style that helps hide a modest budget, including some pastel-perfect cinematography and canny use of visual f/x to create its unique environment, Vivarium may not be to every viewer’s taste but succeeds on its own small terms. Two strong performances help anchor the film, with Poots (who won a Best Actress award for her work here at the Sitges film festival) especially effective as the conflicted “mother”.
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