Vivarium: Claustrophobic sci-fi about 'imposed parenthood' eerily mirrors the experience of self-isolation

With theatres shut, we at Original-Cin are doing what you’re probably doing, watching movies at home. We’ll be reviewing films that would have opened in theatres, but are now streaming, plus other worthy watches on cable and streaming services.

By Jim Slotek

Rating A-minus

In less virus-y world, the taut, weird and claustrophobic sci-fi horror flick Vivarium would be opening at a theatre near you this week. 

Instead – with the realities of voluntary isolation - there’s a touch of literally-too-close-to-home in this tale of a young couple confined to a newly-built British suburban house, with their food and necessities (including, presumably, that invaluable asset toilet paper) delivered to them by mysterious forces.

Captive Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots are reluctant parents to a possibly-non-human baby in Vivarium

Directed and co-written by Lorcan Finnegan the 2019 Cannes favourite is available starting March 27 on the Apple TV app and On Demand. While I already miss the experience of seeing these films in a theatre, Vivarium does evoke TV precedents, most notably Twilight Zone in the cleanness of its premise and the parsing out of dark details on a need-to-know basis. 

There’s also an arch humour underlying the events that fits the trademark abrasiveness of male lead Jesse Eisenberg. Eisenberg and Imogen Poots play Tom and Gemma, a young landscaper and his partner, a schoolteacher. Though they (or mostly he) scoff at the idea of moving to a cookie cutter suburb with an esthetically disturbing motif of day-glow green, the price is low enough for their budget, so they decide to at least look.

Martin (Jonathan Aris), the salesman for the development called Yonder, is a decidedly weird pitch-man, who smiles with the forced precision of someone who just learned how, and speaks in odd non-sequiturs. Asked the location of Yonder, he says, “Near enough and far enough. Just the right distance.”

The unit, number 9, is pre-furnished, with a nursery already painted blue for a boy – an odd thing to show a still-childless couple. And the joke about getting lost in suburban developments because of the sameness of every house, quickly turns real when a fleeing Tom and Gemma run out of gas, repeatedly ending up at Number 9.

If you understand that the title refers to artificial habitats meant for studying captive animals, you already know where this is going. There’s also an opening metaphor where Gemma consoles a child who discovers dead chicks, killed by a cuckoo, a brood parasite that lays its eggs in other birds’ nests to be raised by them.

So yes, this is allegory city even before the alarmed couple find that old movie staple, a baby on their doorstep. Said infant  grows disturbingly fast – within weeks - into a still unnamed child played by Senan Jennings. He is a mimic with profoundly annoying traits and, as it turns out, secrets. Despite this, Gemma bonds with him (while Tom decidedly does not).

Despite the apparent sprawl of Yonder, Vivarium is obviously a confined movie, the house an eye of despair amid fake joy and colour (the clouds and sky are digitally painted like the cheapest of movie set backdrops). 

And, the movie’s title notwithstanding, the suspicion comes  early that this confinement might be about more than “study.” Though, in many ways, Vivarium is more about turning madness into a kind of normal.

Vivarium. Directed and co-written by Lorcan Finnegan. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Imogen Poots and Senan Jennings. Available March 27 on the Apple TV app and On Demand.