VIVARIUM [2019]

 IS IT JUST ME OR DOES NOBODY HAVE AN ATTENTION SPAN ANYMORE?!?! 

I mean, a lot of people don't get this movie -- as if it's some sort of difficult, esoteric, intellectual flick -- and give it some really low one-star reviews/ratings.  Like it's some sort of 'head-scratcher' that is confusing and deliberately obtuse.  It's VERY straight-forward, in fact, and requires no thinky-think to 'get it'.  VIVARIUM spells it out plainly at the very beginning of the film -- during the opening credits fer goshsakes -- when a cuckoo (who is known for this behaviour) nudged the baby birds out of the nest and takes their place when the mother bird returns.  The confused mother bird then feeds the cuckoo as if it was her own chick; in fact, often the father bird does as well until both parents are exhausted and spent -- that's when the cuckoo takes off and leaves after getting all it wants from the perplexed parents.  We have here, before the credits are over, the entire plot of the film.  How exactly is this movie 'hard to understand? 

Our boyfriend & girlfriend Gemma & Tom (Imogen Poots & Jesse Eisenberg respectively) are looking for a new house and drop in on a housing development called 'Yonder' which is said to have reasonable prices.  They are met in the office by a VERY strange man named Martin (a priceless Jonathan Aris) who cajoles the couple into going out to take a look at a house that's up for sale in Yonder.  Martin (again VERY oddly) takes the pair through a tour of the house (Number 9), offers them champagne and strawberries (no thank you) and, asks if they have any children.  No, but they'd like to eventually.  Somewhere during the middle of the tour, Martin walks out of the house and disappears.  Gemma & Tom find Martin's car is also gone.  They decide to leave but somehow cannot find a way out of the seemingly endless housing development.  They drive until their car is out of gas.  Gemma & Tom defeatedly go inside Number 9, and spend the night.  They try hopping fences and walking in the direction of the sun but they always end up back at Number 9.  The strawberries and champagne have no taste.  After spending the night in the house, they find a box outside that contains supplies (all the food is tasteless); however, the couple never see anyone leaving the box or picking it up from the street after they fill it with trash from the day. 

Climbing up on the roof  to get a bird's eye view (pun intended), Tom sees nothing but identical green Yonder houses stretching out seemingly to infinity!  One morning, they find a box outside that contains a baby boy.  The boy grows about a half-dozen years overnight and has the disturbing habit of mimicking whatever Gemma & Tom say or do as well as horribly screeching whenever it wants something.  The boy talks in a weirdly-eerie voice that seems to combine a child's voice with an adults.  This kid is obviously not human.  What is he?  That's kinda the crux of the film and how it affects the two trapped lovers.  In this way, VIVARIUM is very much in the same vein as John Wyndham's THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS; filmed as the classic science fiction film VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED.  It's a riff on the same type of occurrence and both are based on the behaviour of those bastard cuckoos.    

There is a lot of mystery in VIVARIUM but not concerning the plot.  And while we find out that the boy is some sort of 'other' being, we are never force-fed some explanation of who these beings, where they come from, why they are here and how they manage to do all the spectacular things they do.  The sad tendency of viewers in this day and age is to expect every single 'mystery' to be answered and spoon-fed to them.  This is an unfortunate failing of the 'know-nothing tots' mentioned over there on the right-hand column; whenever everything isn't explained to them they tend to get aggressively annoyed and label a film (or book of TV show -- Hello, LOST . . . I'm talking about YOU!) -- as pretentious crap.  No, I'm sorry but this view is too easily used to justify laziness on the viewer's part.  Most viewers do not actually "watch" a film but do what they wrongly term 'multi-tasking':  staring at their phone or other such nonsense when they should be watching the film.  I mean, I've already mentioned how the entire premise of the film is spelled out during the opening credits; and how many 'viewers' of VIVARIUM didn't even see that because they were scrolling through their phones or chit-chatting amongst themselves.  And then, after having missed about half of what's presented to them in the film, they then condemn the movie as arty crap and give it one star.  So, in that respect, if you're that kind of person than VIVARIUM (or many other films which required an attention span) are not for you.  What we have here with VIVARIUM is the speculative science fiction premise that was in the wheelhouse of THE TWILIGHT ZONE and every other mid-20th-century speculative science fiction of a like mind. I guess people in the mid-20th century were able to actually pay attention to something for more than 3 seconds.  *Sigh* 

It's probably about time that I mentioned the performances of Eisenberg and particularly Poots (as well as the startling portrayal of "The Boy #1" by Senan Jennings); all the acting in the film is top-notch and the commitment to the roles are all impressive. The art direction here is also superbly done with the sickly, mint-green-coloured houses and the unmoving cottonball clouds adding to the sense of unease.  I also quite enjoyed director Lorcan Finnegan's earlier horror film WITHOUT NAME and I'm interested to see more from this director.