Vivarium (2019)
Directed by: Lorcan Finnegan
Starring: Imogen Poots, Jesse Eisenberg, Jonathan Aris
Available on: Amazon Prime, and various other mistake-filled platforms

Some films are bad because the premise is idiotic. Others are bad though the premise is good—and Vivarium falls squarely into the second category. It begins with a clever idea: a young couple is lured into a suburban purgatory where every house is identical, and escape is impossible. It’s like The Truman Show if Truman couldn’t leave because he was too polite to break a fence. Or like The Matrix, but with estate agents.

Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) and Gemma (Imogen Poots) are a couple looking to buy a house. That’s mistake number one. They’re shown around a sterile new development by a man with the social charm of a malfunctioning NPC, then left behind in a house that seems identical to every other. The estate agent vanishes. Every road loops back on itself. They are, in effect, trapped in IKEA hell. Then a box arrives. Inside is a baby, with instructions to raise it if they ever want to leave. I was intrigued.

For the first half hour, the film crackles. The horror is uncanny, not gory. The acting is excellent. Poots, especially, does well with the slow, spiralling despair. Eisenberg manages to channel his usual twitchy awkwardness into something that feels appropriate for once. The dialogue is sparse but well-crafted. The child—played by Senan Jennings and, later, Eanna Hardwicke—is suitably monstrous, a shrieking little alien with a bowl cut and a fondness for mimicking his “parents” in a tone of nasal contempt.

And then… nothing happens. For an hour.

This, I’m told, is the point. Modern horror directors have developed a fondness for films that don’t end so much as stop. If you ask why nothing was resolved, or why the characters suffered, or what the final image meant, you’re met with that most tedious of words: “allegory.” I like allegory as much as the next teenager, but there is a limit. Allegory cannot be a substitute for structure. Symbolism is not an excuse for narrative cowardice.

The problem is that Vivarium starts like Kafka and ends like a student short that ran out of grant money. The ideas are there—something about the horror of middle-class domesticity, or the soul-destroying routine of parenting, or the inescapability of social roles. All well and good. But they’re never developed. The film has no second act. It just circles itself, like its characters, until the viewer is as exhausted as they are. Then it ends with the sort of tidy bleakness that critics pretend is profound but which actually says, “We gave up.”

Perhaps I am not being entirely fair. I watched this with Sebastian Wang when visiting him in Borehamwood. He had the gall to suggest that the autistic monster-child was like me. I was outraged. I do not shriek at people across the table. I do not watch endless fractal-like patterns on the television – even if these would be an improvement on some of the films I review. I do not eat cereal for breakfast. Nor do I insist on repeating things in an inhuman monotone—unless, of course, I’m forced to recite something written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Above all, I am much better-looking.

Trying to be fair, this is not a badly made film. The visuals are striking. The set design—a neighbourhood rendered in radioactive pastels—is both nauseating and hypnotic. The performances are tightly wound. The sound design is effective. But all this amounts to less than the sum of its parts. Vivarium is a carefully crafted exercise in going nowhere. The director knows exactly what he wants to say, but not how to say it, or when to stop.

The result is a film that treats its viewers like its characters—trapping them in a loop, giving them just enough to keep watching, then rewarding their loyalty with futility. Some people call this art. I call it dishonest.

Suggested Title:
Vivarium: A Smart Film That Forgets to Finish