Vivarium (2020) - Movie Review

Everyone deserves safety and security in their lives. But there is such a thing as too much of it. We tend to function best with a certain degree of monotony to our everyday routines: A house to exist in, a bed to sleep in, a couch to sit on, a TV to wile away the hours with, a kitchen to cook in, a table with chairs to sit and eat at; y’know, standard suburban living. However, that same blanket of monotony can also smother. It can be a crushing and constant reminder that no matter what you may have done before you arrived, this is it. This is the life you have, every single hour of every single day, for however much you left to live.

Yes, suburbia can be an easy grab for how much the exact same shit day in and day out can burrow into a person’s mind, but this particular example is a bit different from the usual. As far as the audience is shown, there’s no visible hierarchy in charge of this state of existence. There’s no gentrifying boogeymen to rail against. There’s no tangible reason for this place to exist. It simply… is.

This is the setting for this film, a housing development called Yonder which our two leads, Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg, end up stranded in. Knowing their respective pedigrees for neurotic quirkiness, they make for an incredibly solid nucleus for the larger story of soul-crushing tedium that is their new lives within Yonder. Add to that the prospect of them raising a child, who reaches new heights for creepy children in horror movies as every single syllable that comes out of his mouth (or rather their mouths, since Senan Jennings, Eanna Hardwicke and Côme Thiry all have this effect) sounds wrong, and this place doesn’t even feel like a home or even a house. It’s more like a factory.

A factory made up of cloned roads that lead into cloned houses, where parents raise their cloned children under a sky full of cloned clouds, until the child has outlived its carers and goes out into the world to start the process all over again. A process that we keep being convinced is the natural order of things. This is what makes up suburbia, and the effect it has on the main characters is fucking heart-breaking to watch. Maybe I’m in a heightened state to relate to these characters, since lockdown generates a similar feeling of monotonous and empty routine, but this is a horror flick where the scariest parts have nothing to do with the sci-fi-ish framing of the narrative, but rather the mundane, hum-drum, painfully relatable innards.

As far as showing common suburbia as a place where the self dies a slow and torturous death, this is frighteningly effective. I mean, I live in a country where owning your own house is part of the cultural dream, and this film makes that seem like the single worst decision a human being could make in their lifetime. And when looking at the prospect of being stuck in this place, just digging yourself deeper into the tedium until you end up buried in it, the reality of it makes even that feel like an understatement.