Film
Lorcan Finnegan
Advertisement
XYZ Films
THE unnerving strangeness of Vivarium is apparent from the off. In the first 5 minutes, a young child leaving pre-school finds two baby birds lying dead at the foot of a tree, wrestled out of their nest by a cuckoo hatchling.
Schoolteacher Jemma hunkers down by the girl to offer some comfort. “That’s nature,” she says. “That’s just the way things are.”
The girl isn’t buying this. “I don’t like the way things are,” she says. “It’s horrible.”
How right she is.
Mind you, the film’s title has primed us for a classy sci-fi horror. A vivarium is, after all, “an enclosure, container or structure adapted or prepared for keeping animals under semi-natural conditions for observation or study or as pets”, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Jemma (Imogen Poots) and her gardener boyfriend Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) are in search of their first home. They visit a local estate agent and are greeted by Martin, played by Jonathan Aris, who turns his handful of lines into a show-stopping, screen-chewing masterclass in the art of desperately trying to be what you aren’t.
Martin cajoles the couple into visiting Yonder, an estate of identical, medical-green, new-build houses. Once there, he abandons them. By the time they realise they are trapped, the estate is folding back on itself like a four-dimensional Möbius strip and a box has arrived outside the house the estate agent took them to. Inside, there is a baby. At least, it looks like a baby. On the lid of the box, there is a message: “Raise the child and be released.”
“By the time they realise they are trapped, the estate is folding back on itself like a 4D Möbius strip”
The rest of Vivarium plays out with a horrible inevitability. Whether you think the film’s determined logic makes it powerful and compelling, or thin and gratuitous, will depend on your mood that day.
This is territory that director Lorcan Finnegan and writer Garret Shanley want to make their own. This is their second film together after Without Name (2016), where a land surveyor measuring an ancient forest soon loses his reason in an environment with plans of its own.
Their focused film-making is paying dividends. Just look at the leads in Vivarium. Poots and Eisenberg are more than just guns for hire here – they are also executive producers. That they had a ridiculous amount of fun making this movie is evident with every glance, gesture and squeeze of the shoulder.
But Vivarium is no romance. Cut to day 98. The baby has grown into – well, as a matter of fact, Senan Jennings, a terrific 9-year-old actor from County Kildare in Ireland. A little overdubbing and voila, Jennings is playing a cuckoo even more unsettling than Aris’s.
“Are you overwhelmed, mother?” he asks at one point. Yes, she is. And yes, we are too.
With its cinema release delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic, Vivarium is instead available digitally through Amazon Prime Video, Sky Store, Virgin, Google Player, Apple TV and BFI Player.
I am glad for the filmmakers, who certainly deserve their day in the sun after being deprived of a cinema release.
I am also pleased on behalf of all those young couples who might have assumed that Vivarium, with its personable young cast and witty premise, would make a perfect date-night movie. You dodged a bullet there, guys.
Simon also recommends…
Films
The Truman Show (1998)
Peter Weir
Jim Carrey and Ed Harris star in screenwriter Andrew Niccol’s tale of a man who grows up in a perfect surburban setting, only to discover that it is a film set.
Under the Skin (2013)
Jonathan Glazer
Scarlett Johansson plays a predatory alien seeking existential purpose in Scotland. Michel Faber’s original 2000 novel is a cracker, too.
