The opening scene shows a mother bird feeding its young, more graphic than cute. Then we see Gemma (Imogen Poots), a school teacher, saying goodbye to her students and chatting with a friend about the crowded real estate market. Gemma comforts a little girl who sees two dead baby birds that fell from a nest. \u201cThat\u2019s the way things are, it\u2019s nature,\u201d she says, to which the child replies, \u201cI hate the way things are.\u201d Up in the tree is Gemma\u2019s boyfriend Tom (Jesse Eisenberg), a landscaper who gently buries the birds. They\u2019re easy and affectionate with each other as they take off in Gemma\u2019s car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The moment they step into the office of a new housing development called \u201cYonder\u201d the film shifts tone from realism to strange stylization. The office has photos of pale mint-colored houses in rows. The sales agent Martin (Sherlock<\/em>\u2019s Jonathan Aris) is a strange obsequious man who Tom can\u2019t resist making fun of. Martin insists that properties are being snapped up, and convinces them to take a tour. They follow him in his van, arriving at the huge development full of identical empty pastel houses. After a cursory look at the cookie cutter home, Tom and Gemma decide it\u2019s not for them, and notice Martin has vanished. They try to leave, but despite driving for hours, they can\u2019t get out of the circuitous development. They decide to spend the night in the house. The next day, the van runs out of gas, and they try to find their way out on foot, but with no luck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The next day a box of food and supplies arrives, mysteriously. The food is tasteless. Soon, a wiggling wet baby boy arrives in a box. Tom and Gemma understand they are trapped and become resigned to this strange life, playing along in hopes they will be released if they perform as expected. Their carefree dating life is suddenly transformed into a rote existence, dominated by having to care for a child and find a way to make life meaningful when all they want is to escape. The two lead actors couldn\u2019t be better: Eisenberg, who portrays Tom\u2019s waning hope as a kind of creeping exhaustion, and Poots, whose expressive face conveys the inner struggle she feels as motherhood is forced on her. As Tom and Gemma navigate the sudden enforced intimacies of their new life, they also contemplate the existential dread that greets each waking day. Where to go? Nowhere. What to do? Nothing. What\u2019s it for? Unknown. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The metaphorical implications are quite shocking at times, yet the story feels strangely down to earth. There\u2019s a clear homage to Twilight Zone<\/em> here, and its grandiose explorations of modern terrors and social structures. I also detected a nod to my favorite episode of Black Mirror<\/em>, \u201cHang the DJ,\u201d which plays people like pawns in a pre-ordained system of matchmaking. Production design is stunningly tight, with a brilliant sound design that allows every silence and every scream to echo with eerie finality. I\u2019m not a big fan of horror films that don\u2019t provide adequate context for unexplained occurrences, but that wasn\u2019t a problem here. Director Lorcan Finnegan and screenwriter Garret Shanley offer little justification for the way things are, and, as the little girl at the beginning points out, that seems to be the point. Vivarium<\/em> is an incisive and heart-wrenching commentary on the nature of modern life, and our inability to see the bigger picture. An eerily prescient expression of our current \u201csheltering in place\u201d reality, Vivarium is a clever, deeply disturbing speculative fiction. Its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":533,"featured_media":13719,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[340,1381],"tags":[1098,162],"class_list":["post-13717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-movies","tag-movie-review","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/533"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13717"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22871,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13717\/revisions\/22871"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/vivarium2-1024x576.jpg\")
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<\/p>\n\n\n\nA<\/h1>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"