VIVARIUM. Haunting sci-fi from the creator of Surfer

Vivarium raises many questions while offering almost no answers – and that is by no means a criticism.

In an attempt to fulfill their dream of owning a home, a young, childless couple – teacher Gemma and gardener Tom – along with real estate agent Martin, go to inspect a property in Yonder, a suburban neighborhood of detached houses. The houses are identical: painted in a sickly green, two-story row houses with perfectly trimmed lawns and small gardens. While visiting the property at number nine, Martin suddenly disappears without a trace, so Gemma and Tom decide to leave the neighborhood. However, they get lost in a maze of identical streets and repeatedly end up at the same house; when their car runs out of fuel, they try to leave the neighborhood on foot, but the result is always the same: a return to house number nine.

They also cannot call for help, as their phones do not work. Forced to live in the neighborhood, one day they find an infant under the house along with a message reading: “Raise the child, and you will be released.”

Lorcan Finnegan studied filmmaking at Zeppotron, a production company owned by Charlie Brooker (creator of Black Mirror), where he worked as an editor and graphic designer. In the early 2000s, he founded his own studio, Lovely Productions, creating music videos, commercials, and short films such as Defaced (2007), Changes (2007), and Foxes (2011). In 2016, he made his feature film debut with Without Name, which won four awards at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. Recently, attention has been on Finnegan’s latest film, The Surfer (2024) starring Nicolas Cage, but the Irish director had previously made another intriguing work – Vivarium, based on a screenplay by Garret Shanley and starring Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg (both of whom also served as producers). Vivarium was not a box office hit, but it received the Gan Foundation Support for Distribution award at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival in 2019.

Vivarium is a visually very consistent film: endless rows of grotesquely green buildings stretching to the horizon, sterile interiors of the houses, and a perpetually blue sky with motionless clouds and an oddly artificial sun reminiscent of Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), create a coherent, yet alien, eerie, and claustrophobic world. Yonder resembles the titular vivarium – an enclosed space designed for the presentation, observation, breeding, and raising of animals or plants, simulating the natural environment of the specimens.

But who is observing Tom, Gemma, and the strange child with a talent for perfect mimicry, who in just a few dozen days develops from an infant into a fully grown being? Is it some advanced computer simulation run by artificial intelligence? A cruel social experiment conducted by half-baked conspirators? An invasion by an alien civilization?

Finnegan does not provide clear answers to these questions but hints at the latter possibility, which brings Vivarium closer to Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned (1960). Yet the starting point – the impossibility of leaving a seemingly open place – also recalls Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962), a surreal satire of the bourgeoisie, in which guests at a lavish party are inexplicably unable to leave. Could Finnegan have similar ambitions? Is Vivarium a critique of the dull, homogeneous suburban life? A parody of predatory real estate practices? A metaphor for marriage and parenthood as inescapable traps, and childhood as a form of parasitism? The symbolism of the cuckoo, laying eggs and pushing chicks out of the nest in the opening scenes of Vivarium, seems particularly significant.

It is a thought-provoking film that demands reflection and personal interpretation. It could be an adaptation of a lost Philip K. Dick story.