Directed by: Lorcan Finnegan
Starring: Imogen Poots, Jesse Eisenberg, Senan Jennings, Eanna Hardwicke
Rated R, 97 minutes
It’s important to remember that movies coming out now—movies that were supposed to be released in theaters and are instead being released online due to social distancing guidelines—were made long before the novel coronavirus ever appeared. Such is the case with “Vivarium,” a claustrophobic thriller about, incidentally, a young couple stuck for several months in a house with nothing to do. That the movie gets its release in the middle of these circumstances does little, however, to make “Vivarium” feel prescient or important, but instead humbles the movie, revealing its small-mindedness and weak construction.
Somewhere on the outskirts of an unnamed city, a suburban development called Yonder sits under uniformly fluffy clouds, each house the same dimensions and the same shade of seafoam green. House-hunting couple Gemma (Imogen Poots, “28 Weeks Later”) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg, “The Social Network”) find a real estate agent who shows them one of the Yonder houses, but when they try to leave the neighborhood, they get impossibly and hopelessly stuck driving in circles, winding up in front of the same house over and over. Several desperate hours later, with an empty gas tank and nowhere else to go, they give up and start living in the dreary unit.
What follows is a surreal devolution of the formerly happy couple, stuck in this eerie neighborhood without any neighbors, no cell service, and nothing in their house that would indicate that it’s their home. Their only company is a nameless young boy (Senan Jennings, “The Secret Box”), left on their doorstep soon after their arrival, whom they begrudgingly begin to raise as if he were their child. Tom, seeking something to do, pulls his old gardening tools from the car and starts digging a bottomless pit in the front yard; he becomes obsessed with the task and drifts away from Gemma almost completely. With no one else to turn to, Gemma spends more time with the boy, developing a tense sort of camaraderie with him; he screams uncontrollably and mimics her voice back to her with uncanny accuracy, while she reminds him, repeatedly, that she isn’t his mother.
That the movie is a metaphor for the numbing effect of mass production, that it preaches against conformity and capitalism, that it warns us about the repetitive nature of human folly is not by itself what makes “Vivarium” such a slog. What undoes this movie is instead its lack of anything else to entertain or instruct us. It’s “Suburbicon,” but without the plot; it’s “mother!” but without the pandemonium; it’s “The Truman Show,” but without novelty or mystery or humor. Whatever attachment we have to “Vivarium” is offered solely through its central metaphor of a house as a prison. Many of us understand this metaphor all too well these days; with nothing else on its mind, this movie doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know.
It isn’t all awful, though. Imogen Poots proves a bright lead, committing admirably to Gemma’s fragile state of mind. Jesse Eisenberg remains capable of only three expressions (casual mockery, cruel mockery, and deadpan), but in their scenes together, Poots brings out a little more life from her co-star. The movie’s best moments are its quiet, close-up scenes between Gemma and Tom, as they acknowledge the stress of their new life and the importance of sticking together; that they are unable to stop their descent despite seeing it coming is the movie’s most insightful statement. We come to feel real pity for them, even if the feeling is muted by the movie’s lack of personality.
These hints of sincerity are welcome, but also far outnumbered and outmatched by moments of predictable symbolism and philosophical screeching. Dullness can be forgiven, but arrogance is exhausting, and “Vivarium,” with its axe to grind with all of society, spouts over-simplified truisms like a know-it-all who read a Kafka story once. Without asking any questions, the movie gives both diagnosis and prognosis, and the outlook is decidedly bleak. It’s unfortunate that it arrives at a moment that makes its lofty ambitions seem amateurish and small, but even in the absence of social distancing, even without the global crisis that denies us complacency so much more viscerally than “Vivarium” does, it’s hard to believe a screed like this would do much more than fall on deaf ears anyway.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 4/3/20.