VIVARIUM
Home sweet home…
For anyone who didn’t have to study Latin at school, a ‘vivarium’ is an enclosed space where live animals are raised for observation or research. Its fantastical equivalent in Lorcan Finnegan’s dystopian sci-fi is Yonder, a seemingly pictureperfect development whose endless avenues of identical houses offer an enticing vision of suburban bliss to those unwary enough to enter it.
Too late do would-be home-owner Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) and his girlfriend Gemma (Imogen Poots) realise Yonder is a labyrinthine prison from which they can never escape – unless they agree to rear the infant boy dumped on their doorstep by the same unseen forces that provide them with regular provisions. Said boy grows up to be an unholy terror whose high-pitched screeches and impersonations of his ‘parents’ drives Gemma to distraction. Tom, meanwhile, becomes obsessed with digging a hole in the garden, a literal displacement activity that makes as much sense as anything else in this Twilight Zone of deserted domesticity.
CERTIFICATE 15 DIRECTOR Lorcan Finnegan STARRING Jesse Eisenberg, Imogen Poots, Jonathan Aris, Eanna Hardwicke SCREENPLAY Garret Shanley DISTRIBUTOR Vertigo RUNNING TIME 97 mins
With aid from Philip Murphy’s oppressively mundane production design and Kristian Eidnes Andersen’s unsettling score, Irish director Finnegan presents a hellish portrait of consumerist conformity in a film that inevitably evokes the technological nightmares of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. One dazzling sequence of reality-warping dimension-hopping apart, however, Vivarium spends the majority of its running time in a narrative cul-de-sac, one as lacking in answers as it is in exits.
Compensations are offered by Eisenberg’s nervous energy and the quiet indomitability Poots lends to her character’s appalling ordeal. Don’t be surprised, however, if you find yourself as desperate to leave Yonder as they are. Neil Smith