March
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Vivarium (15+)
Vivarium (15+)
Director: Lorcan Finnegan
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Imogen Poots, Jonathan Aris, Danielle Ryan, Eanna Hardwicke, Olga Wehrly
Run time: 1hr37m
Synopsis: A young couple, thinking about buying their starter home, visit a real estate agency where they are received by a strange sales agent, who accompanies them to a new, mysterious, peculiar housing development, to show them a single-family home. There they get trapped in a surreal, maze-like nightmare.
URL: https://youtu.be/U3Xy2x9NDrw
Director Lorcan Finnegan [Without Name (2016), Foxes (2012)] brings us the eerily prescient Vivarium -a starkly minimalist sci-fi parable of dehumanization written by Garret Shanley. This black comedy movie about suburban life becomes a horror metaphor for suburban life. The film starts with a disturbing image of a cuckoo ejecting a baby bird and egg from a nest which serves as a leitmotif for the dark, disturbing, dystopian tale brimming with dark humour and satire.
A young couple – Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) and Gemma (Imogen Poots) are thinking about buying their first home. They visit a real estate agency where they are received by a strange pallid sales agent Martin (Jonathan Aris), who accompanies them to a new, mysterious, peculiar, sprawling, soulless housing development ‘Yonder’, to show them one of the indentikit, cookie-cutter, family homes. There, underwhelmed and with Martin gone, Tom and Gemma find they are trapped in a surreal, maze-like nightmare with no escape.
Production designer Philip Murphy has built ‘Yonder’ to be a visually stunning estate, frozen in time, a dangerous blend of The Truman Show and The Twilight Zone.
Endless Lynchian white picket fenced houses, packed with every mod-con, stretch to the horizon under two-dimensional clouds – evocative of those in Rene Magritte’s The Empire of Light series of paintings.
An edgy, discordant score by Kristian Eidnes Andersen underlines this Kafkaesque nightmare and Sisyphussian family horror tale, evoking a mood which is convincingly rendered by Eisenberg and Poots and the ensemble cast.
A vivarium (Latin, for “place of life”) is an area, usually enclosed, for keeping and raising animals or plants for observation or research. This Vivarium may confound almost as often as it intrigues, but it is well-acted sci-fi/horror hybrid with interesting ideas which are explored with style.
Vivarium is streaming now on iTunes, Amazon Prime and Google Play.
Images courtesy of: Vertigo Films
Lorcan Finnegan and Imogen Poots at the Q&A session Glasgow Film Festival, February 27, 2020
Lorcan Finnegan and Imogen Poots at the Q&A session Glasgow Film Festival, February 27, 2020