LIFE IN A FISHBOWL
Film about sinister claustrophobia spoon-feeds its message to audiences
There are many varieties of vivaria.
You may be familiar with the aquarium or terrarium, butterfly conservatory or aviary, even the adorably named penguinarium, which can also house puffins.
Movies offer their own particular form, the suburbarium, a kind of biome of the outer city.
The best examples are from the late ’90s and include Pleasantville — two teenagers are transported into a 1950s sitcom — and The Truman Show, in which Jim Carrey’s character lives inside a fake suburbia, constantly filmed for TV audiences.
Vivarium, from Irish director Lorcan Finnegan, features a similar if more mysterious and threatening vibe.
Young couple Gemma and Tom (Imogen Poots, Jesse Eisenberg) are house-hunting, and decide to take a tour of a new subdivision called Yonder.
Something about the salesman seems off, but Yonder they go, where the skies are filled with oddly regular cotton-ball clouds, and the houses are a sickly shade of green — think of a cross between hospital walls and the food they serve inside them.
Unfortunately, the salesman leaves mid-tour, and Gemma and Tom can’t find their way out — all roads lead back to the same house, and even following the sun on foot returns them to their new home.
Just like a lot of real-life couples (except, you know, way more literally) they’re stuck in the suburbs.
It’s an intriguing setup, but Finnegan does little to explore its deeper, darker corners.
For one thing — creative decision or budgetary limitation, you decide — there are no other inhabitants in this cookie-cutter subdivision.
Actually there is one. Gemma and Tom discover that an Amazon-like service is delivering packages of food and other supplies to their home, though frustratingly never when they’re watching the street.
One day the box contains a baby boy, who grows up quickly — in a few months he looks to be about eight, and dresses as though heading out to a Mormon convention.
He speaks alternately in a uncanny adult voice and, when hungry, a piercing scream. Somehow, the freaked-out couple bonds with this weird new arrival.
It’s never quite clear what the adults do with their long, empty days, although Tom soon gets it into his head to start digging up the lawn to see what he can find below.
In the other direction, they scrawl an SOS on the roof, but no planes ever fly over.
Of course, it’s impossible to watch movies these days through anything but pandemic-coloured glasses, and the notion of being trapped in your house will resonate far more than the filmmaker intended.
But leaving aside coincidental frisson, there’s just not enough to engage the viewer on an intellectual level.
Though there are some nice production-design touches, like the fractal-and-moiré-pattern channel that is the only TV available, and the stars do a good job of becoming slowly more unhinged over the film’s 97 minutes.
But Finnegan does us all a disservice with — metaphor spoiler alert! — an opening montage of baby birds, their species and behavioural tics helpfully spelled out by Poots’ character before the real story begins. If one of the unearned clichés of suburban dwellers is a supposed lack of critical thinking and a requirement for spoon-feeding of information, Vivarium does little to suggest that it believes any differently about its audience.