Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium invites viewers into a refreshing contemporary iteration of the much-loved and frequently explored film trope of American suburbia. It is a fever dream of a movie, trapping viewers into an absurd and claustrophobic limbo that is both mundane and horrifying, thus becoming a chilling reflection of our own self-isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The film follows a young couple, played by Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg, who try to navigate the housing market. They shortly find themselves trapped in the hellscape of Yonder, a surreal suburban development characterised by artificially uniform households and eerie streets that stretch on forever into the horizon. When they try to escape, the street constantly loops back to their perfect cookie-cutter house, so they are pushed to isolation and the brink of insanity, with the task to raise a creepy mutant child.
Notes of sci-fi, horror, and psychological thriller compliment the acting, set design and CGI visual effects to evoke the uncanny valley of Vivarium. The soundscape is most impressive as its unfamiliar echoey qualities enrapture viewers into the suspense and weirdness of the hyperreal landscape of Yonder. At times, it is eerily silent, cosmic, industrial, haunting and distorted, thus adding to the growing sense of paranoia and loneliness. Despite the film’s objective to convey the drudgery of routine, the repetitiveness drags on and becomes redundant ever for the sake of evoking mundanity. Still, it manages to be darkly humorous. The film resourcefully works around a smaller budget to engage viewers into an unsettling, nightmarish environment through digitally enhanced visual and audio qualities.
Conceptually, it feels like a feature-length development of Finnegan’s earlier short film, Foxes, but the surreal and immersive trip into suburbia additionally comments on the purgatory of modern home-ownership. “The dream of owning a home can soon turn into a nightmare”, he says on the director’s statement. Like the couple, most people in reality will be trapped in life-long debt. Vivarium projects a grotesque and doomed exaggeration of this, exaggerating the fear of wasting life and being trapped.
Finnegan revamps suburbia, where it becomes an effective conduit for a dense examination of the contemporary world. As suburbia is such a comprehensively explored film trope, Vivarium is not ground-breaking or perfect but it still manages to be resonant. In providing a haunting and empathetic reflection the seemingly unattainable reality of owning a home, Vivarium reminds us of the value of compassion and solidarity during our experience of social isolation amidst this pandemic.
Vivarium launched 16 April on Google Play, iTunes, Fetch and Umbrella Entertainment and will be available via Foxtel’s On Demand service from May 6.