On the recommendation of a friend, the other night Ben and I took a break from our usual evening diet of Supernatural and Criminal Minds and fired up the Amazon Prime machine to watch Vivarium. Naturally, while we were watching we went to IMDB and did some sleuthing. The reviews were evenly split between, "What the hell did I just watch?" and "Absolute Genius." It was one of those films with little middle ground where audience opinion was concerned. Admittedly, when all was said and done, I found myself in that middle ground. I was simultaneously fascinated and disturbed by the story told.
I found the following article about the film on Screen Rant, and I have to admit it tracks pretty closely with my interpretation of what we'd seen:
The story of suburban hell told in Vivarium takes on a far darker and bolder topic as its ending unfolds. Director Lorcan Finnegan's sci-fi thriller tells the story of a young couple stuck in a seemingly perfect suburban neighborhood that quickly reveals itself to be a nightmare of societal demands. Vivarium centers on gardener Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) and kindergarten teacher Gemma (Imogen Poots), a happy young unmarried couple who are seeking to make their first step onto the property ladder. This leads them to visit a deeply strange estate agent named Martin (Jonathan Aris), who makes lavish promises of the beauty and perfection of a newly built development named Yonder, and coaxes them into taking a tour of one of its properties.
Yonder is comprised of seemingly endless rows of wholly identical homes and roads that always lead back to the same place. After Martin vanishes, Tom and Gemma try to leave by end up going round in circles, forcing them to stay in the Yonder property he showed to them.
Their various attempts to leave end in failure, and in frustration, Tom decides to burn down the house. The next morning, it's still there, seemingly rebuilt overnight, and now there is a box with a baby waiting for them. Attached is a note: "Raise the child and be released."
As the days pass, the nameless child (played by Senan Jennings) rapidly grows in size and has an eerie adult-like voice that perfectly mimics both Tom and Gemma. He screams like a banshee until he is fed. He refuses to leave Tom and Gemma alone for a second and he copies their every move, except for moments when he watches the TV, which only shows strange psychedelic patterns. As Tom and Gemma find themselves forced into the role of parents for this unsettling creature, their health begins to worsen and they find themselves trapped in a mundane yet hellish daily cycle of the same old routine – one they can seemingly never escape from.
What Happens In Vivarium's Ending
Tom and Gemma interact with the child in different ways. Tom instantly hates him and tries to harm him several times, but Gemma always intervenes. Occasionally, Gemma will try to talk to the boy and treat him in a kind manner, hoping that he can give them some answers about their situation—or, at the very least, become a normal kid. Tom eventually becomes obsessed with digging a hole in their garden, which further exacerbates the growing gap between him and Gemma and pushes her more towards the child. One day the boy vanishes, only to return with a strange book full of indecipherable symbols. Gemma plays a game to get him to reveal where he's been, only for him to begin mutating into some form of monster.
More time passes and suddenly the boy has grown into a full-blown adult. Both Gemma and Tom have grown weaker, although Tom still digs his hole from morning until night. The boy starts disappearing every day and Gemma's attempts to follow him prove fruitless. Eventually, Tom's hole yields a discovery of a corpse in a body bag. His own health rapidly worsens and he eventually dies in Gemma's arms. At that moment, having said that it's time for Tom to be "released," the boy returns to them with a body bag. Shocked and disgusted, Gemma finally becomes furious enough to attack the boy with a pickaxe, but he escapes by pulling up the pavement like a rug and escaping into an Escher-esque underground.
Gemma follows and discovers the seemingly endless parallel worlds where couples like her and Tom are stuck in near-identical situations, each raising an otherworldly child. Every single one of them is miserable. One man has even died by suicide in the bathtub. Spat back into her world, Gemma also dies, with the boy by her side. He dumps the bodies in the hole that Tom dug, fills it back in, and then leaves Yonder to return to the real estate office. There, Martin is old and on the verge of death (though only a year has passed). He passes on his name badge to the boy and then dies, leaving the new Martin to take his place. A new couple walks into his office, and the cycle begins anew.
The Boy's Identity And Yonder's Purpose
Though it's never made explicit in Vivarium's ending, the most obvious interpretation of Yonder and the strange boy that Tom and Gemma are forced to raise is an alien abduction story. The film opens with a shot of a newly hatched cuckoo pushing other baby birds out of the nest. This is a phenomenon in nature known as brood parasitism, in which some birds will lay their eggs in a stranger's nest in order to trick the other bird into raising their young. In Vivarium's opening, the cuckoo eventually becomes so large that when its unwitting adoptive parent returns to feed it, the cuckoo looks like it's about to consume the adult bird's head—foreshadowing the movie's ending.
Vivarium takes the behavior of the cuckoo and reimagines it as an alien or extradimensional species that has invaded Earth and forces humans to raise its offspring by trapping them together in a "nest" (in this case, the house at No. 9 in Yonder). Just as some female cuckoos are able to lay eggs that resemble the eggs of the bird species whose nest they are left in, the boy's species is able to imitate humans closely, but not perfectly. Tom and Gemma notice something is off about Martin as soon as they arrive in the real estate office and observe his strange behavior, and the boy's voice definitely doesn't sound like a normal human child.
Compounding the alien abduction theory is the strange alien language that appears in the boy's book and the patterns that appear on the TV, which are clearly communicating to him. At one point Gemma asks the boy to imitate the person who gave him the book and he starts to transform, with bulging growths on his neck. Later, after she attacks him with the pickaxe, he gets down on all fours and scuttles like an animal – all of which points to him being an alien species in disguise. The impossible space that Gemma stumbles into when she tries to chase the boy at the end of the movie definitely seems like an alien construct, as does the impossible space of Yonder itself.
Based on Vivarium's ending, it seems that these aliens age rapidly, growing to adulthood within a year (the boy looks about six years old after just three months) and declining from middle age to old age within the same space of time. They sustain themselves by trapping human couples in Yonder and forcing them to raise their weird children, and when a new "Martin" reaches adulthood, he replaces the old one. The aliens do not appear to form any kind of emotional attachments to their adoptive parents, and do not grieve for them when they die.
The Real Meaning Of Vivarium's Ending
There have been plenty of stories in pop culture about the hell of suburbia, and Vivarium is not shy about wearing those influences on its sleeve. The Blue Velvet comparisons are easy to make and the film is also reminiscent of classic episodes of The Twilight Zone and the works of Yorgos Lanthimos, especially Dogtooth. At its heart, this is a familiar story about the smothering confines of the supposedly ideal life that has been commodified for the masses. The white picket fence dream remains a potent force in society, and it's one that's become ever more unattainable to the younger generations, making the forced fantasy all the crueler.
Tom and Gemma are literally stuck in this heteronormative structure of what a couple is "supposed to do" as they get older. Against their will, they have been forced into the suburban life, a home they despise, a routine they grow resentful of, and a child neither of them wanted. They are now stuck on a path for life that is both mundane and horrifying – one that ends in their deaths, with their bodies left to rot on the grounds of the house they hated. They aren't alone in this nightmare either, as the parallel worlds of Yonder reveal. This is the world that awaits us all, or at the very least, the white heterosexual middle-class couples to whom this fantasy is primarily sold to.
Interestingly, Tom and Gemma never ask out loud why they have been trapped in the world of Yonder and its restrictive rules. (Nor do they ever try to gain access to any of the other houses in Yonder.) They just get on with it because they have to. This is partly what makes Vivarium so fascinating: It is keenly aware of the smothering expectations placed upon people to adhere to societal norms, even as they become more unattainable and less desired by younger generations. Nowadays, we are less tied up by such conventions and it's far more normal for people, whatever gender they are, to remain unmarried, child-free, or off the property ladder, whether it be through choice or financial restrictions. Still, even today, it is that image of the happy suburban white couple with children and a mortgage that dominates the world and is deemed the default mode of life. Tom and Gemma were not picked to become a new part of Yonder for any other reason than because they were there, and that makes their fate all the more terrifying. It could happen to anyone.
The most interesting and arguably the boldest aspect of Vivarium is in how it takes on the concept of parenthood. Here, to be a parent is to be forced into a one-sided parasitic relationship that will sap you of your very life essence. It is to be miserable and unfulfilled, to commit to something that will never make you happy or yield vaguely satisfying results. Tom and Gemma did not want a child but the society of Yonder demanded it, and the boy who grows in years as the days pass is unnerving, lacks imagination, and is utterly helpless without them. It's a blunt metaphor for the realities of parenting, but most stories end such narratives in a happy way, revealing how it was all worth it in the end.
Vivarium doesn't do that. This is a film with the sheer guts to position the act of being parents as potentially the worst thing one could do with their lives, a mistake they will regret until they die. That remains one of society's last true taboos and Vivarium pulls no punches with it. Even when Gemma shares tender moments with the boy, she absolutely refuses to let him call her his mother. Her dying words to the now-grown boy are just that: "I am not your f***ing mother." It's a final act of defiance in the face of a world that took everything from her, and one that verbalizes countless people's lives, both within Yonder and in the real world.
It's clear that Finnegan's latest feature found bits of inspiration from many projects in the realm of sci-fi and suspense, especially Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone, but ultimately, Vivarium is a wholly original production that offers plenty for viewers to take away. It relishes in its beautifully bizarre fever dream of a story and is all the more successful because of it. Not only that, it provides a relevant social commentary that sticks the landing in the end. Although its eerie originality may not be for everyone, Vivarium will certainly be quick to find a strong, loyal audience.