Somebody hates suburbia. Somebody just plain loathes planned, walled-off communities with cookie-cutter monopoly houses and mind-numbing suburban monotony. The surprising thing is that somebody isn’t me. Yet for all I cannot stand communities where it’s impossible to tell your house from your neighbor’s, I never actually made a movie about it.
Gemma and Tom (Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg) are a standard [read: dull] young couple waiting for their lives to begin. They are not yet married and have clearly not yet discussed the parameters of marriage (for those playing at home, it’s religion, politics, and children … all else is negotiable). On a whim, they decide to look at houses, maybe imagine the lives they intend to develop. It’s not the worst idea, but they’re going about it all wrong; the two enter a “real estate office” which is little more than a college dorm room lined on either side wall with ugly green birdhouses. What’s that? Those aren’t birdhouses, they’re models? Impossible. Those are birdhouses.
The eager and off-putting salesman, Martin (Jonathan Aris) assures the couple that the location is “just near enough” and “just far enough” at the same time. Curiosity gets the better of our heroes and they follow Martin to a monochromatic neighborhood where everything is new, but nothing is right. The houses are identical as if they were copy/pasted from a computer program. The clouds are abundant, but self-contained and equally dispersed like the sky is wearing a polka dot shirt. There are no cars in this endless residential neighborhood, no animals, no change of weather. There are no people.
None. The roads all circle back on themselves and reset like some sort of Atari game.
When Martin disappears, Gemma and Tom are left alone in this ghost town to live in the model house Martin displayed. Their attempts to find the city limits prove fruitless; no matter what they do, they return to “their house.” Every day a new box arrives, in the street, no less, with vacuum sealed packages containing the necessary items for existence. And this is their Vivarium, or human Zootopia, perhaps, with none of humor and all of the pain. Want to see two adults get frustrated for two hours? Have I got a treat for you…
Vivarium is a tease; it’s a wonderful premise that translates into a blah film. Oh, I’m sure it will have fans among the disenfranchised or “too intellectual for their own good” sets. There always seem to be folks convinced Barton Fink is a brilliant mystery, too. It isn’t. And this isn’t. At the end of the day, we’re left with two increasingly sour leads struggling to understand and not encountering a single mystery-solving strategy. Nobody is going to mistake this for categorically “bad” or “unwatchable,” but it certainly qualifies as “disappointing.” The Vivarium seeds of a great mystery have yielded a bumper crop of weeds. Weeds all uniform and green of exactly the same variety.
Two nothings find themselves a-reel
When they encounter perpetual ordeal
Escape does no good
As they’re trapped in a ‘hood
That’s missing a bottle and big hamster wheel
Rated R, 97 Minutes
Director: Lorcan Finnegan
Writer: Garret Shanley
Genre: The evil of suburbia
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Sadists
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: “Try it. What’s the worst that could happen?”
