Black Mirror to modern anxieties
Vivarium (M, 97 mins) Directed by Lorcan Finnegan Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★1 ⁄2
Anyone who has ever gone to an open home as a potential first-home buyer knows exactly what it’s like to step into a demented parallel existence, where nobody is who they seem and the days eventually blend into a burgeoning nightmare of relationship stresses and dread of what the future might hold.
Which, I guess, is maybe what writer-director Lorcan Finnegan had in mind when he penned the story that became Vivarium.
Or, maybe he just wanted to mess around with the idea of a young couple being trapped in some suburban hell, doomed to raise someone else’s child if they ever want to taste freedom again.
Whatever he was thinking, Finnegan has delivered a mostly pretty tasty and effective film that never quite gets to where you hope it might, but never really drops the ball completely either. As with Finnegan’s earlier Without Name, this is no thriller or horror, more a slow-burning dream of entrapment and anxiety. Vivarium is set in a vision of identikit utopia that reminded me of everything from Edward Scissorhands to The Truman Show. The slowly unfurling story seemed to me to owe a little to both Dark City and – no, really – Eraserhead, admittedly without anything of the delirious and dark energy of the latter.
But, whether it’s a satire of life in the ’burbs, or a straight-up sci-fi yarn about the horrors of being the host for another lifeform’s incubation, Vivarium has its pleasures.
And, with Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network) and Imogen Poots (Green Room) in every scene, even the occasionally baggy storytelling and less-than-razorsharp dialogue still get carried to places a couple of less watchable and charismatic leads could never have taken it.
Go in to Vivarium expecting something like a pretty good, but not great, episode of Black Mirror would be my advice.
Vivarium is available to stream on iTunes, YouTube, Academy on Demand, The Bridgeway on Demand and Deluxe at Home.