Baby you’re trapped in SUBURBIA
With cinemas closed, this dark satire will keep you in suspense at home
AVIVARIUM is a container in which animals or plants are raised, usually for observation purposes, although a greenhouse is also a type of vivarium. There is another kind of green house at the centre of this beguilingly odd science-fiction chiller by Irish director Lorcan Finnegan.
Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg star as a wholesome couple called Gemma and Tom. A weird estate agent shows them round a green house, part of a new development called Yonder, of identical houses on identical streets.
When they drive away, they find that all roads lead back to the same house. They are trapped in Yonder, in a kind of glossy property brochure writ large.
At first, Vivarium feels like a twisted satire on suburbia, exploring broadly the same territory as George Clooney’s 2017 film Suburbicon. There are also echoes of Peter Weir’s classic 1998 take on cultural voyeurism, The Truman Show.
When a baby arrives in a box, with the instruction that if they raise it they will be set free, it seems like a darkly comedic stab at prosaic aspirations. But gradually Vivarium sheds its comic pretences and nudges much closer to horror.
As the boy grows, he starts unnervingly mimicking Gemma and Tom, and unleashing deafening shrieks when he doesn’t get his way. Yet Gemma can’t shed her maternal impulses. ‘You’re a mystery and I’m going to solve you,’ she tells the child, affectionately.
Tom isn’t duped. He doesn’t refer to the child as ‘he’, but ‘it’. I was reminded of some friends, whose son Jack went on a French exchange visit, and were mildly alarmed when the French boy’s mother emailed them, asking ‘What does it eat for its breakfast?’ In this case, of course, the issue isn’t linguistic confusion but downright hostility.
For Tom, the boy is an unwelcome interloper. I wondered at this point whether the film might be saying something about the stress on a relationship that even yearned-for parenthood can exert?
The truth is, I’m still not sure what its message is. Finnegan, and writer Garret Shanley, keep us guessing to the end. But it is slickly done, with cinematography that at times conspicuously evokes the surrealist paintings of Rene Magritte. As with Magritte, I liked Vivarium without quite understanding it. O I DIDN’T entirely understand
THE JESUS ROLLS either, but not in a good way. It’s like sitting in on a joke that you’re excluded from, which would be annoying enough in the cinema, but in your own home, after shelling out €6.99, feels downright offensive.
The film is written and directed by John Turturro, who also stars as the titular Jesus Quintana, the dissolute ten-pin bowling king he fleetingly played in the Coen brothers’ majestic 1998 comedy The Big Lebowski. Maybe Jesus belonged in the wings, not centre stage, where the appeal of his roguish charm quickly shrivels and dies.
I loved Turturro’s 2014 film Fading Gigolo, and his cast here also includes Susan Sarandon,
Christopher Walken, Audrey Tautou and Jon Hamm, with Bobby Cannavale as Jesus’s sidekick.That’s a quality line-up by any measure, but alas, my mighty expectations were soon dashed, as it became clear that The Jesus Rolls — a remake of the 1974 French road-trip comedy Going Places as well as a Lebowski spin-off — is a dud.
It begins with Jesus being met by his friend Petey (Cannavale) on his release from prison. They then hook up with the promiscuous Marie (a hammy Tautou), and the trio go on an orgy of carstealing, house-breaking and, indeed, orgies.
The women in this film are little more than sex objects, for which Going Places also got nailed, but at least had the excuse of being made in France, half-way through the unenlightened 1970s. The Jesus Rolls has no excuse at all.