Liminal horror may be all the rage these days, but the conscious use of surrealist creeps isn’t exactly new. Many films of the decades have utilised the unsettling nature of an uncanny, empty space to their benefit, including The Shining and Cube, but in 2019, Lorcan (The Surfer) Finnegan, gave us an unnerving, but underseen trip into the between-spaces of reality.
The best uses of liminal space in movies tend to be the ones that take surroundings that are supposed to be bustling with life and then present them as so empty, virtually everything that was once comforting about becomes overwhelmingly sinister. With this in mind, Finnegan’s target is the usually friendly realms of suburbia, as his sci-fi story subverts and perverts those pleasant looking rows of houses and neat lawns into something out of a hallucinogenic nightmare. Unsettling encounters with otherworldly beings usually includes probes, death rays and inhuman things inspecting you, but what if the most terrifying interaction was for you to experience is to settle down and have a child?
Couple Gemma and Tom are looking to get on the housing ladder, but as she’s a primary school teacher and he’s a landscaper, they find that their options are limited. However, with love in their hearts and hope in their heads, the couple decide to visit a housing development named Yonder just to see what it’s like only to find themselves in a surrealistic fever dream when the rows of identical houses prove to be less of a future and more of a trap.
For a start, their spider sense probably should have been triggered by Martin the real estate agent, who proves to be an exceedingly weird fellow indeed. But laughing off his strange personality quirks and the fact that he takes great interest in the fact that they don’t have children, Gemma and Tom go with him to Yonder and are shown around the floor plan of the house marked number 9. However, pretty soon things go odd as, after showing them around, Martin disappears and Gemma and Tom discover that no matter how long they drive and which route they take, not only can they not escape Yonder, but they keep ending back at number 9.
Essentially trapped in a space where normal physics and geography don’t make sense, Gemma and Tom end up living at number 9 quite simply because they have nothing else to do. Tasteless, bland food is provided in cardboard boxes that are delivered to the street outside by an unseen hand and even an attempt to burn the neighbourhood down results in the couple discovering that the house is indestructible. However, they soon discover the reason behind their strange abduction to this deserted suburbia when a box turns up one day with the instructions “raise the child and be released” printed on the flap. Inside the box is a humanoid baby, but despite appearances, this little mite is anything but human…
I have to say, for such an out-there concept, I found Vivarium to be something of an easy to predict watch and that probably has something to do with the fact that Finnegan basically tells you everything that’s going to happen by using footage of a baby cuckoo taking charge of a nest in the opening credits to forshadow the whole damn thing. For those unfamiliar with the callous M.O. of the bird, it’s pretty simple really, they lay their egg in the nest of another and then abandon it as it hatches, dispatches the other chicks and leaves it’s new, utterly clueless mother to feed it despite it growing to be three times bigger than the bewildered parent. While it’s a good narrative theme to run with, it also makes Vivarium annoyingly easy to anticipate for anyone with a healthy experience of surreal sci-fi, as the second that creepy-ass baby shows up, it’s rather obvious what the movie is trying to achieve. However, while I’d admit that the lack of surprises was an initial disappointment for me, thankfully Vivarium manages to hold the interest thanks to some strong performances, some intriguing world building and the film’s amusing insistence that settling down with a kid is tantamount to a living hell.
Obviously, with this in mind, the real meat of the film is watching the relentless grind of repetitive, suburban existence slowly erode the relationship between the central couple. Starting the film as one of those perky, witty couples you end up hating on property TV shows, Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots soon get to explore the dehumanising experience as they are stuck raising an unwanted “child” in an impossibly homogenised environment. Trapped in the parody of a family, the Boy may age faster, but he’s obviously gone to the Kid From The Babadook School of Annoying Prepubescents as everything about this creepy little bugger is designed to strip away every shred of patience. Gifted with the speaking voice of a twenty year old and prone to bouts of inhuman shrieking when he wants something, it makes you seriously wonder what Finnegan’s deal with parenthood is. However, it’s certainly fun to watch all involved deconstruct it all through this warped, sci-fi mirror.
However while the film has a good line in hypnotic dream logic, those who fancy their films to feature more realistic character choices may find the entire enterprise just too frustrating for their tastes. On the other hand, the impressive design of the film should clue the more savvy into the fact that standard logic simply doesn’t apply, and that some of the more extreme choices made by Gemma and Tom (her school teacher habits eventually kick in, he obsessively digs a giant hole in the front garden) are all falling into the details of Finnegan’s grand plan. Each identical house that stretches off into infinity is the same shade of sickly green and even the sky, with it’s plump, strangely unconvincing clouds, screams of a deliberate use of the uncanny valley. Similarly, as the film enters its final act, some of the weakening strands of reality finally give way to give our leads a glimpse of what unfathomable things lie behind the curtain, but the film wisely holds off on any trite explanations in order to further add to the confusion.
At the end of the day, Vivarium ultimately earns it’s surreal sci-fi stripes by painting a depressing view of so-called civilised suburban life as a soul-draining act of futility aided by the fact that their unasked for child is more of a parasite (or cuckoo) than an enriching parenting experience. However, when trapped in an inescapable, bland, hell where there’s nothing to do and all food is tasteless, what else is there to do except indulge in the whims of an unfathomable, alien force.
While certainly an acquired taste and not as unpredictable as you’d think (that early cuckoo metaphor really does give the game away), Vivarium is still a gripping, dispassionate sci-fi conundrum that offers up a creepily recognisable form of liminal purgatory. However, for all of it’s reality stretching premise, the most far fetched aspect is that the film casts Jesse Eisenberg as a gardner. Guys, come on…
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