Vivarium (2019)

Gemma (Imogen Poots) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) are on the young couple’s lookout for a first house. Their search leads them to an encounter with a rather peculiar estate agent (Jonathan Aris) who is really, really keen on showing them one of his houses.

The development where it is situated looks like a nightmare of bland pastels, breathing a kind of ordered artificiality that does suggest the whole thing is the product of minds who don’t quite understand concepts like houses or home. While they are exploring the house on offer, which turns out to breathe just the same kind of nightmarishly blandness as its surroundings, the estate agent disappears. Worse still, Gemma and Tom can’t find a way out of the development of perfectly identical buildings under a perfectly unchanging sky, neither on foot nor by car. In the end, they always end up at “their” house again. They are trapped.

Somebody is dropping off perfectly bland groceries tasting like a perfectly bland simulacrum of the real thing when they aren’t looking, so they do not risk dying, at least. After some time, said somebody is dropping off a baby too, with a note explaining that the couple will be freed if they take care of it.

At first, the baby seems normal enough, but it grows much faster than a normal human being would, and the boy (Senan Jennings, later Eanna Hardwicke) it becomes is even less so, copying and imitating its “parents” in ways that seem built to break them.

While I’m sure its style and tone will be annoying to quite a few viewers, to my eyes, Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium is an absolute masterpiece. There aren’t terribly many movies aiming for something parallel to the tone of modern non-cosmicist weird fiction, or Robert Aickman, but this one’s not just aiming, it is hitting perfectly what it is trying to achieve.

There’s a fantastically nightmarish quality to the whole film, a design sense that perfectly suggests the setting to be a copy of something human as constructed by something deeply non-human, emphasising the passive-aggressive power of blandness and the horrors of a place that is absolutely ordered to someone else’s rules. The place Gemma and Tom find themselves in is hell, even if it isn’t the hell of Christianity, and their captors are not demons. In fact, the film isn’t calling these captors evil exactly. Instead, in one of the most interesting aspects of the film, it makes them so ambiguous it is never clear if they are malevolent, indifferent, or simply don’t understand these or any other human concepts at all. It simply makes clear there’s little difference between malevolence and indifference if the entity that is either malevolent or indifferent has nearly absolute power over you.

It’s no wonder that the characters break in these kind of surroundings even before they are ordered to take care of their very own changeling, and the way they are breaking is very well done indeed, Finnegan portraying how a very non-realistic pressure drives Gemma and Tom apart in effectively realist ways, thereby finding a way to ground a film based in something we can’t quite relate to through the humanity of his characters. Poots and Eisenberg are both very strong here, really helping to provide the film with an empathetic emotional resonance as well as the more abstract one.Their reaction to something they can’t comprehend is utterly comprehensible, and becomes increasingly heart-breaking the worse their mental states become. In fact, I have seldom seen a film where I wished some Hollywood ending for the characters; though the whole tone and style makes it clear they are doomed from the start.

And that’s before I’ve even mentioned their horrible child-thing, copying and repeating in what feels like a cruel parody of an actual child, screeching for food, and sucking all energy out of Gemma, while Tom’s simply starting to dig a hole instead of confronting what is going on. Which does obviously more than just hint toward a metaphorical angle of this being about the horrors of conformity, the fears of young parenthood, etc. Yet even though the film’s most certainly about these things, it never loses the feel of watching people confronted with something they can’t comprehend, and which can’t truly comprehend them either. That some of this also fits into some modern Fortean ideas about transdimensional entities is just added icing on the cake.

But really, what makes Vivarium so great is that it takes all of these ideas and influences and turns them into a, sometimes very darkly funny, nightmare, holding to its mood perfectly and without wavering.

Three Films Make A Post: Are you a watcher or a player?

American Ultra (2015): Stoner and slacker Mike (Jesse Eisenberg) learns that he is in fact a government super spy experiment when an overacting idiot (Topher Grace) and his gang of spy goons start burning down his home town to murder him and his girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart). Despite being written by only one guy, Nima Nourizadeh’s action comedy thing is pretty much a mess of tones and forms that neither belong nor fit together. But then, that writer is Max Landis, whose own films and scripts tend to be messes (sometimes hot ones). So expect a film that wavers between Mark Millar-style cynical low-brow violence humour, nerdy playfulness, indie rom com and random crap without sense or much of a point, with acting performances that suggest a director who didn’t tell anyone in front of the camera for what he was going, and scenes that are sometimes good as standalones but never come together to form an actual film. Plus, this is a film that tries to sell me the idea that being allowed to work as a killer for an organization that tried to murder you is some kind of a happy ending. Seriously.

I Bury the Living (1958): Albert Band’s gothic and somewhat Twilight Zone-ish tale of a new part-time cemetery director - played by Richard Boone in a nice tour-de-force performance that allows his character to be rather more fragile than typical of male leads of this time - who comes to the conviction that changing the pin colours on a wall map of the cemetery kills people is for the longest time a fine low budget film. In its mood of increasing (melodramatic) dread and use of expressionist techniques and a bit of early Sam Fuller-style tackiness, it’s a film rather atypical for US genre cinema of its time, particularly those set in the contemporary USA.

Unfortunately, the status as a lost classic one could imagine for the film is badly served by a “natural explanation” so preposterous and illogical even the writers responsible for quite a few of today’s lame twist endings would be embarrassed by it.

Negative (2017): While its plot certainly isn’t terribly plausible (unless you compare it to the ending of I Bury the Living), Joshua Caldwell’s tale of a hapless photographer (Simon Quarterman) being drawn into the desert road movie style flight of a former British spy (Katia Winter) is good low budget spy movie fun. The film recommends itself with stylish and atmospheric shots of the desert, two lead characters who for once in a movie of this kind don’t fall in love but whose actors do work well together, a nice line in sarcastic dialogue, and a handful of more than decent action and suspense sequences.


It’s certainly not a film that’ll change anyone’s life (unless by chance) but it is worth watching.

In short: Adventureland (2009)

Not being a professional middle-aged US film critic, I don’t really share the group’s love – obsession, really – for coming of age films (nor films about directors whining about how horrible their life of luxury and fame is). You probably need to be nostalgic for your youth to love the sub-genre quite so much, I suspect, and I tend to be not terribly nostalgic for the worst decades of my life.

Anyway, that doesn’t mean I cannot appreciate when a coming of age movie works as well as Greg Mottola’s film about a young guy (Jesse Eisenberg) taking a summer job in an amusement park to scratch together the money for his college tuition does. Especially when a film puts an enormous effort into portraying a recognizable time and place. While Adventureland certainly hits the usual beats of its genre, it is often really rather witty doing it, with sharp dialogue and pacing that suggests thoughtfulness without being slow.

The film also takes some pleasantly unexpected turns, adding complications and depths to character types that don’t usually get these, in coming of age comedies particularly. The film even makes efforts to treat its female characters as more than pure hurdles for its teenage male white main character to jump over, under or through. Characters who have their own lives, wishes, and dreams that might even not have anything to do with the protagonist at all. In fact, one of the film’s more subtle arguments seems to be that growing up means learning to realize how people and their lives aren’t only important in the ways they relate to one’s own life, and that some adults – here exemplified by Ryan Reynolds – never learn this kind of empathy and understanding, which stunts them more than any shit job ever could.


This is also one of the better outings of young Kristen Stewart, doing an okay job in the part of her career when that sort of consistency wasn’t a given – which is of course perfectly understandable from a nineteen year old kid.