Vivarium (2019)

Gemma (Imogen Poots) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) are on the young couple’s lookout for a first house. Their search leads them to an encounter with a rather peculiar estate agent (Jonathan Aris) who is really, really keen on showing them one of his houses.

The development where it is situated looks like a nightmare of bland pastels, breathing a kind of ordered artificiality that does suggest the whole thing is the product of minds who don’t quite understand concepts like houses or home. While they are exploring the house on offer, which turns out to breathe just the same kind of nightmarishly blandness as its surroundings, the estate agent disappears. Worse still, Gemma and Tom can’t find a way out of the development of perfectly identical buildings under a perfectly unchanging sky, neither on foot nor by car. In the end, they always end up at “their” house again. They are trapped.

Somebody is dropping off perfectly bland groceries tasting like a perfectly bland simulacrum of the real thing when they aren’t looking, so they do not risk dying, at least. After some time, said somebody is dropping off a baby too, with a note explaining that the couple will be freed if they take care of it.

At first, the baby seems normal enough, but it grows much faster than a normal human being would, and the boy (Senan Jennings, later Eanna Hardwicke) it becomes is even less so, copying and imitating its “parents” in ways that seem built to break them.

While I’m sure its style and tone will be annoying to quite a few viewers, to my eyes, Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium is an absolute masterpiece. There aren’t terribly many movies aiming for something parallel to the tone of modern non-cosmicist weird fiction, or Robert Aickman, but this one’s not just aiming, it is hitting perfectly what it is trying to achieve.

There’s a fantastically nightmarish quality to the whole film, a design sense that perfectly suggests the setting to be a copy of something human as constructed by something deeply non-human, emphasising the passive-aggressive power of blandness and the horrors of a place that is absolutely ordered to someone else’s rules. The place Gemma and Tom find themselves in is hell, even if it isn’t the hell of Christianity, and their captors are not demons. In fact, the film isn’t calling these captors evil exactly. Instead, in one of the most interesting aspects of the film, it makes them so ambiguous it is never clear if they are malevolent, indifferent, or simply don’t understand these or any other human concepts at all. It simply makes clear there’s little difference between malevolence and indifference if the entity that is either malevolent or indifferent has nearly absolute power over you.

It’s no wonder that the characters break in these kind of surroundings even before they are ordered to take care of their very own changeling, and the way they are breaking is very well done indeed, Finnegan portraying how a very non-realistic pressure drives Gemma and Tom apart in effectively realist ways, thereby finding a way to ground a film based in something we can’t quite relate to through the humanity of his characters. Poots and Eisenberg are both very strong here, really helping to provide the film with an empathetic emotional resonance as well as the more abstract one.Their reaction to something they can’t comprehend is utterly comprehensible, and becomes increasingly heart-breaking the worse their mental states become. In fact, I have seldom seen a film where I wished some Hollywood ending for the characters; though the whole tone and style makes it clear they are doomed from the start.

And that’s before I’ve even mentioned their horrible child-thing, copying and repeating in what feels like a cruel parody of an actual child, screeching for food, and sucking all energy out of Gemma, while Tom’s simply starting to dig a hole instead of confronting what is going on. Which does obviously more than just hint toward a metaphorical angle of this being about the horrors of conformity, the fears of young parenthood, etc. Yet even though the film’s most certainly about these things, it never loses the feel of watching people confronted with something they can’t comprehend, and which can’t truly comprehend them either. That some of this also fits into some modern Fortean ideas about transdimensional entities is just added icing on the cake.

But really, what makes Vivarium so great is that it takes all of these ideas and influences and turns them into a, sometimes very darkly funny, nightmare, holding to its mood perfectly and without wavering.

Three Films Make A Post: This is the moment when 32 lives are laid bare!!!

Frank & Lola (2016): Matthew Ross’s sort of psychological thriller (in the way certain Chabrol thrillers position themselves to the genre) is a rather frustrating film in so far as the film nearly comes together as something very special but instead ends up as a demonstration of talent that doesn’t quite take on the shape of a successful film. Certainly, Ross has visual style yet also – not always a given for stylish directors – trusts his actors to do their work, getting fine performances out of Michael Shannon and Imogen Poots, and then applying his powers of pizazz to enhance them. Yet still, the film never quite comes together as the psychosexual noir love story it is selling itself as, never quite making its characters coherent enough to work. The film makes a habit out of leaving just the wrong things ambiguous, emphasizing just the wrong moments; it’s like an instrument that’s always just a little bit out of tune.

Sweet Virginia (2017): Turning this into an inadvertent double feature, Poots also features in Jamie M. Dagg’s rural neo noir about murder plans gone wrong, love hidden, and friendship betrayed that among other things teaches us that you probably should not hire a random crazy fuck-up to murder your husband, nor do so before you are actually sure there’s any money to pay the guy. While Poots’s husband murdering ways are getting the film’s plot going, it actually concentrates on Christopher Abbott as Elwood, the guy she hired to do the deed, and Jon Bernthal as former rodeo rider turned broken (with so much rage and violence locked away) motel owner Sam Rossi. There’s not much here anybody looking for an original plot will find interesting, but that’s really not the point here; rather, this is a film interested in exploring its characters together with its audience, turning the rote clichés they could be into people, and then telling its dark story about betrayals and violence in an off-handed manner that never quite hides how dark some of the undercurrents here are. That much of what happens is obvious and feels inevitable isn’t a flaw but part of the film’s point.


La peau blanche aka White Skin (2004): This French Canadian arthouse (in the slow French style) horror film directed by Daniel Roby about two students encountering what you can read as female vampires, succubi, or cannibals is a bit of a mess. At times it seems to want to explore the meaning of Blackness in French Canada, 2004, while keeping its main black character in a supporting role; at other times, it seems to try to explore the idea of obsessional love, and the terrors and joys of the love of family; there may also be something about the morals of cannibalism in it. However, while Roby’s direction is generally artful, he never actually decides what exactly it is he is talking about, going off in different directions for little reason and never really arriving anywhere concrete, resulting in a feeling of insubstantiality that fits a film that acts so cerebral rather badly.

In short: Green Room (2015)

A small series of unfortunate events leads the members of a punk rock group (Anton Yelchin, Joe Cole, Alia Shawkat, Callum Turner and David W. Thompson) onto the stage of a rural Nazi skinhead bar. As if that weren’t bad enough, after the gig, they stumble onto the aftermath of a murder in the backroom. The Nazis, led by club owner Darcy (Patrick Stewart), operate on a clear no witnesses policy, so the band and not-really-a-member-of-the-Nazi-club-anymore Amber (Imogen Poots) soon barricade themselves in a room while a horde of murderous assholes (and their dogs) try to kill them.

Where Jeremy Saulnier’s last film, Blue Ruin, applied lessons learned from US arthouse indie cinema to the vengeance flick, Green Room does something similar to the classic siege movie, though this one is a bit more invested in fulfilling certain genre expectations than the earlier film. That’s not a bad thing, mind you, for Saulnier fulfils these expectations with calm and thought, telling the horrible misadventures of people way in over their heads through no fault of their own with an economy and efficiency one can’t help but imagine the patron saints (say Hawks and Carpenter) of the kind of genre movies this is modelled on would look upon approvingly.

There’s still quite a bit of US indie cinema tradition on display here, particularly in the acting approach, especially the line delivery. Now, I’ve seen a few reviews complaining about the dialogue being difficult to understand, but to my ears, that’s really just people either needing to get their ears checked or not able to cope with a somewhat more naturalistic acting style. The acting is actually pretty great, every Brit on screen (and there are quite a few of them) putting on their best US accents, and projecting appropriate levels of hysteria and fear while doing believably stupid shit, their characters not being action heroes and all. Patrick Stewart does some fine work for once playing a bad guy (and an American), avoiding scenery chewing for a more banal kind of evil, which seems the appropriate way to portray a neo Nazi.

Once Green Room gets going, events evolve quickly into some truly horrible violence, where a badly broken hand looks like a bloody mess, and death by dog seems as frightening and plain horrifying as it would be in reality. Particularly the first few deaths hit pretty hard, not because Saulnier is pulling out all the stops when it comes to gore – he’s certainly not afraid of showing the bloody consequences of violence but he’s not lingering on these things either – but because their staging feels believable, real, and final in a way not many directors even try to achieve. Despite not going in the direction of torture porn and despite following more of a thriller plot structure, Green Room does feel like a horror film for most of its running time, thanks to a lingering sense of dread hanging over much of it.

At the same time, the film is also a really tight, claustrophobic and inventive siege movie; just one that’s perfectly ready to hit characters and audience with an expertly timed low blow from time to time.