Vivarium (2019)

directed by Lorcan Finnegan

Belgium, Denmark, Ireland

97 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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It took me a long time to watch this for reasons unknown. I think it was just too popular at the time and that intimidated me. There's a whole lot to unpack here, and I'm about to attempt to do that, but before anything else, I want to say: this movie is good. It's very good. I want to make sure I emphasize that it's an excellent movie aside from all of the metaphors and symbolism I believe it uses, and even if 100% of what it tries to convey goes over your head, I think anybody can still enjoy it just because of its overall quality.

The image of rows and rows of identical houses in a labyrinthine suburban neighborhood is not, by itself, necessarily indicative of any particular message, because it's used so frequently in media that it doesn't have to be attached to any societal commentary anymore. It can just be a motif used for aesthetics. It can come up in a child's drawings and in fact frequently does- the lines of houses made up of a block with a triangle for a roof, two windows, a little door; everybody knows how to draw that. But Vivarium does take a deeper look at this image of a perfectly spotless and identical suburbia, and it examines how insidious the idea of a "neighborhood" is at its heart. I think most things about this film were made to represent the unnatural cycle of life that capitalism tries to impress on young people- but not everything about it, which was crucial, and which I will get into later.

The film starts off with a young engaged couple wandering into a real estate company's office and eventually being shown around Yonder, a housing development made up of, as I just said, innumerable rows of the same house copied and pasted over and over to infinity. The sky is wrong; the clouds don't look real, and nothing about the scant bits of "nature" that exist in Yonder here and there is natural. In short, it's all obviously constructed as a prison of sorts. And it ends up being one- the couple immediately gets roped into staying in their assigned identical house, No. 9, and is almost as quickly presented with a human baby and the instruction "Raise the child and be released". 

(The child is probably the creepiest thing about this overall pretty creepy film. That boy just ain't right.)

One of a multitude of tiny details that makes everything about this movie's scenario that much more sinister is that the agent who shows the main characters the development emphasizes that it is good for a young couple. The very last thing Imogen Poots' character says before her and her fiancé get trapped in the neighborhood is that they don't have kids- not yet. These two facts, them being young people and not having had children yet, are why they're unacceptable to Yonder and, in a larger sense, to what society expects of us. It's not acceptable that by a certain time a couple should still be without a home and children, never mind personal desires or the economical instability that might lead them to that situation. "Not yet" is never a good enough explanation for not having children. A woman can't be allowed to have her own reasons for living her life at her own pace. The monitoring eyes of capitalism have to know if she can be used to reproduce more subjects.

Circling back around to the child they're given: The aspect of reproduction is what makes Vivarium such a nightmare to think about, insofar as any one singular thing can be described that way- the whole thing is just a horrible scenario to imagine yourself in. It's explicitly established that the only purpose of a mother is to produce identical, obedient subjects, who will then further ensnare other potential mothers into Yonder, who will then continue the cycle and produce more subjects in an endless loop. I am intentionally only mentioning the role of Poots' character as a mother because it seemed to me that her counterpart did not have too much of a part in any of this. I still wonder what Yonder really wanted with him- I guess he was kept around so that she would be slightly more complacent, but why allow him to dig the hole in the front yard and discover the whereabouts of their home's former inhabitants? But then that leads to the question of just... why do anything? Why any of this?

Things that seemed open-ended and made no sense were vital to the overall feel of the movie because, coming back to what I said at the beginning of this review about not every single thing being tied to a recognizable metaphor, it's better that a large portion of this is just totally absurd and random. It makes for a better viewing experience and more stuff to chew on. I know that I've used this as an example for how not to make a "dystopian" film before, but I think back yet again to that movie where straight people are ostracized and gay people are the norm. Simply flipping a stereotype on its head does not good science fiction make. Pointing a finger at a thinly veiled caricature of society doesn't do it for me either. A contextless child's drawing of rows of square-and-triangle houses means nothing without a narrative behind it. But something like Vivarium that is not straightforward, that has all of these bizarre and unsettling elements to it- like the fact that the boy seems to be in contact with some thing, some indescribable entity that may or may not be running the show- something like this is an interesting, unique dystopia. It merges recognizable commentary on society with the truly weird. Imogen Poots really does carry the film, even though kind of the whole point is that no space is given for her or her fiancé to be individuals. Her performance, especially at the end when the relentlessness of the neighborhood's assault on her leaves her just broken and helpless, is what makes this movie as good as it is. And again: it is very, very good. Director Lorcan Finnegan is establishing quite a track record.