"Shallow, Bizarre and Depressing"

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What You Need To Know:
VIVARIUM has a strong humanist worldview and explores the existentialist, politically correct horrors like marriage being a prison, parenting a scam, homeownership a trap, and the high probability of everyone dying alone. Although there are some biblical morals of motherhood shown by Gemma to the child and preserving love between the couple, the bleak atmosphere is never contrasted by authentic relationships. As a result, the movie ultimately falls flat. VIVARIUM also contains lots of foul language, bedroom scenes and brief nudity. VIVARIUM is too bizarre, too depressing and too shallow.
Content:
More Detail:
VIVARIUM is a suspenseful horror-drama about a dating couple who are hoping to find the perfect place to live. They are convinced to travel to a suburban neighborhood called “Yonder,” where all the houses are identical, but when they try to leave the labyrinth of suburban homes, each road takes them back to where they started. VIVARIUM has a compelling concept, achieves a grimy, claustrophobic atmosphere, and offers serviceable performances, but is too bizarre and depressing, and fails to capture any meaning aside from several cliched motifs and metaphors for emptiness.
The movie stars Imogen Poots as Gemma and Jesse Eisenberg as Tom, who play a couple. The movie opens with a nature vignette of the life of a cuckoo bird. It begins with the bird pushing the other chicks from a nest and being fed by the unfortunate mother bird until the imposter is fully grown and ready to leave the nest.
The movie cuts to Gemma as she teaches an elementary school class about nature and having the students pretend to be trees. Gemma cares about her students, and after class is dismissed, she comforts one of them who stumbles across two featherless chicks who have appeared to have fallen out of the tree. Gemma explains to the young girl that although the cuckoo bird may seem “terrible,” it is all a part of life.
Tom, who is a groundskeeper, jumps out of the tree and suggests burying the dead birds. He sings an unintelligible religious chant as a joke. He tells Gemma, his girlfriend, that he eventually wants to buy a gardening truck that he can get dirty so that he doesn’t have to use her car.
The couple, looking for a house to begin their life, stroll into Prospect Properties, where they are met by an odd realtor named Martin. Martin convinces the couple to follow him to a new suburbia he calls “Yonder.” He claims it’s the perfect place to raise a family. Upon entering a gated community, Tom and Gemma notice that all the houses are identical, the yards are ideally kept, and the sky looks more like a painting than an actual sky. Martin leads them to house #9 and gives them an uncomfortable tour until they finally reach the backyard. Convinced they don’t want to live here, they turn to find Martin has disappeared, along with the car they followed into “Yonder.”
What was a nonchalant visit to a possible new home turns stressful as Gemma and Tom try to find their way out on their own. Turn after turn, they always end up arriving in front of house #9. Tensions rise between the couple as they become more confused by the labyrinth of mint-green houses. To their dismay, their car runs out of gas by nightfall, and they spend the night at house #9. They find champagne and strawberries in the fridge, but the food has no taste.
After more failed attempts of finding their way out the next day, they begin to receive care packages in the form of cardboard boxes that have tasteless but vacuum-sealed food and essentials. One day, the cardboard box contains a child that the couple must raise to gain their freedom. However, time passes differently in “Yonder,” and the couple grows fearful of the child who always seems to study them in an inhuman fashion and grows at an alarming rate. Tom thinks they should kill the child, but Gemma, despite telling him she’s not his mother, wants to care for him. The nightmare for Gemma and Tom becomes more and more disturbing.
VIVARIUM has a compelling Twilight Zone concept, achieves a grimy, claustrophobic atmosphere, and offers serviceable performances. However, the movie does little to explore anything below the surface of the characters and doesn’t answer many simple conceptual questions about the world. The heavy expositional dialogue and odd pacing make both the characters and any attempt at a “moral of the story” feel disjointed and shallow. The director creates a foreboding, stale atmosphere, but without any moral or emotional substance, he leaves viewers wondering, “Why should I care?”
VIVARIUM has a strong humanist worldview and explores the existentialist, politically correct horrors like marriage being a prison, parenting a scam, homeownership a trap, and the high probability of everyone dying alone. Although there are some biblical morals of motherhood shown by Gemma to the child and preserving love between the couple, the bleak atmosphere is never contrasted by authentic relationships. As a result, the movie ultimately falls flat. VIVARIUM also contains lots of foul language, bedroom scenes and brief nudity. VIVARIUM is too bizarre, too depressing and too shallow.