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Vivarium, 2019
Gemma (Imogen Poots) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) are a young couple who are getting ready to take the next step of settling down and having children. One day, they are taken to a strange suburban development by a real estate agent named Martin (Jonathan Aris). Martin abandons them, and the couple find that they cannot escape the suburb. Soon, a baby is left at their doorstep, and they find themselves raising the strange child as they continue to try and get out of the eerie, abandoned neighborhood.
A decent premise is stretched paper thin and frustratingly redundant.
It’s hard to know, honestly, what the point was in making this a feature-length film. The movie gives away its premise in literally the first minute, and from there it doesn’t seem as if it has much to say in either its sci-fi or its allegorical themes.
The science fiction aspect of the film is probably the strongest. The baby left at the front door grows to adolescence in just a few months. As a boy---or a thing that looks like a boy---he delivers ear-piercing shrieks whenever he is hungry, abating only when the exact right amount of milk has been poured into his bowl. He is otherworldly, and yet he is just human enough that Gemma and Tom are unable to take decisive action against him. Intellectual reasoning tells the couple that this is not really a boy, may not be anything close to human, and yet just his physical appearance and occasional glimpses of youthful behavior provide him protection from them.
And on the allegorical front, yeesh. Being trapped in the suburbs (literally!), raising a child that drains the life out of you (literally!), being forced into unwanted domestic roles (literally!). There is something really basic and uninspired about the setting of a suburb that just goes on and on, never letting the couple escape. Everything about the presentation feels half-baked, like the movie was made from an outline of a script instead of an actual script.
The only bright spots, for me, were the performances from Poots and Senan Jennings, who plays the strange boy being raised by the couple. Poots single-handedly gives her character a bone-deep weariness haloed by contempt as a woman whose own kindness and humanity keep her trapped in a waking nightmare. Jennings is unsettling and strange as the inhuman child, switching between child-like wonder and deliberate cruelty at a moment’s notice.
File under “should have been a 15-minute short film”.
Vivarium, 2019
Gemma (Imogen Poots) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) are a young couple who are getting ready to take the next step of settling down and having children. One day, they are taken to a strange suburban development by a real estate agent named Martin (Jonathan Aris). Martin abandons them, and the couple find that they cannot escape the suburb. Soon, a baby is left at their doorstep, and they find themselves raising the strange child as they continue to try and get out of the eerie, abandoned neighborhood.
A decent premise is stretched paper thin and frustratingly redundant.
It’s hard to know, honestly, what the point was in making this a feature-length film. The movie gives away its premise in literally the first minute, and from there it doesn’t seem as if it has much to say in either its sci-fi or its allegorical themes.
The science fiction aspect of the film is probably the strongest. The baby left at the front door grows to adolescence in just a few months. As a boy---or a thing that looks like a boy---he delivers ear-piercing shrieks whenever he is hungry, abating only when the exact right amount of milk has been poured into his bowl. He is otherworldly, and yet he is just human enough that Gemma and Tom are unable to take decisive action against him. Intellectual reasoning tells the couple that this is not really a boy, may not be anything close to human, and yet just his physical appearance and occasional glimpses of youthful behavior provide him protection from them.
And on the allegorical front, yeesh. Being trapped in the suburbs (literally!), raising a child that drains the life out of you (literally!), being forced into unwanted domestic roles (literally!). There is something really basic and uninspired about the setting of a suburb that just goes on and on, never letting the couple escape. Everything about the presentation feels half-baked, like the movie was made from an outline of a script instead of an actual script.
The only bright spots, for me, were the performances from Poots and Senan Jennings, who plays the strange boy being raised by the couple. Poots single-handedly gives her character a bone-deep weariness haloed by contempt as a woman whose own kindness and humanity keep her trapped in a waking nightmare. Jennings is unsettling and strange as the inhuman child, switching between child-like wonder and deliberate cruelty at a moment’s notice.
File under “should have been a 15-minute short film”.