Aubrey Malone
Jesse Eisenberg
and Imogen Poots
star in Vivarium. Vivarium (15A)
Excellent *****
Like all great science fiction films, suspension of disbelief is key to the immersion in the plot that’s demanded here – and richly achieved. We enter the seventh circle of hell and accept it because, hey, that’s just the way things are.
So when Tom and Gemma, a house-seeking couple, are led into a newly-built estate filled with identikit green houses by a creepy estate agent and find themselves stuck there when he disappears, you’re in that world with them, totally accepting the absurdity.
And, let’s face it, everything seems a bit absurd in these days of Covid-19, doesn’t it?
Yes, there’s shock. Yes, there’s bewilderment. But there also seems to be a kind of resignation to the weirdness on their part. That makes it all so captivating.
Not once do they talk about people they know. In fact we don’t get to find out if there are any. We see Gemma, a teacher, with her class at the beginning but the lion’s share of the action happens in the demonic ‘No. 9’ – the house they’re consigned to without any hope of getting out. It becomes their universe.
What kind of sick game is being played on them? Things take an even weirder turn when they find a baby in a box outside their door. “Raise the child,” a message says, “and be released.”
Easier said than done. It’s a mutant. Within 98 days it’s become a young boy, a precocious lad who torments them by imitating their voices, screaming when he doesn’t get what he wants. And looking ominously like the creepy estate agent as he gazes fascinatingly at abstract designs on a TV set.
Then he becomes a man – presumably within a further 98 days…
Vivarium isn’t easy viewing. It turns into a horror film in the last quarter. But if you allow yourself to be sucked into its dystopian vortex you won’t want it to end. Stanley Kubrick would have been proud of it, or David Cronenburg.
Sanitised houses
Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots are the ordinary couple pitchforked into the extraordinary world director Lorcan Finnegan presents us with. For 90 minutes we look at rows of sanitised houses, storybook skies and a billiard table lawn that Tom uproots as he tries to tunnel his way to freedom.
It took an ingenious mind to dream all this up. It put me in mind of everything from The Box to Suburbicon to Trond Fausa’s equally surreal The Bothersome Man. Finnegan never takes his foot off the gas. He makes abnormality the new normal.
There are no apocalypses here, no catharses. Just the Stygian descent into a Groundhog Day of torture.
Like the ill-fated protagonists, we’re consigned to a perverse Garden of Eden, an endless hall of mirrors, a repeating decimal, a barrage of Russian dolls proclaiming, like the Jean-Paul Sartre of ‘Huis clos’…no exit.
The film, for those interested, has received an online release across various digital platforms.