"You are a mother, someone who prepares her son for the world [and then] dies," a droid-like boy tells his captive carer in this satirical sci-fi about the horrors of domesticity. From director Lorcan Finnegan and screenwriter Garret Shanley, Vivarium follows Gemma (Imogen Poots) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg), a young couple looking to purchase their first home together. Meeting with realtor Martin (Jonathan Aris), they are immediately discomforted by the man's creepy, robotic presence but take him up on his offer to visit a suburban development called Yonder.
Martin paints Yonder as a utopia, claiming it provides "all you need and all you want," but when Gemma and Tom see the neighborhood for themselves, they aren't convinced. The endless rows of identical houses spook them, as does Martin's increasingly strange behaviour. Inside house number nine, Gemma and Tom share looks as they browse the house's unusual decor — framed photographs of the house itself and a fully furnished boy's room — and Martin mimicks Gemma in a pitch-perfect tone. Things take an even stranger turn when Gemma, clocking nobody is around, turns to ask Martin when people are due to move in and finds he has gone.
Attempting to leave the neighbourhood themselves, they get lost in the maze of houses and find themselves back at number nine again and again, but it isn't until the next day that they realize they are truly screwed. Having now tried escaping on car and foot, Gemma and Tom relent, staying in number nine and living off the vacuum-packed food anonymously dropped off for them. Then another package is left for them, one that is far less welcome and reads, "Raise the boy and be released." Inside it is a baby boy who grows up, at an alarmingly rapid pace, to be just like Martin: weird, frightening, and not quite human.
Mini-Martin — dubbed "the Boy" by Gemma and Tom — talks with an eerie grown-up voice, mimicks the couple in arguments, and screams almost constantly. In essence, he is the couple's worst nightmare, and the rest of the movie sees Gemma and Tom argue over what to do with him: kill him, or raise him?
Surrealist and rooted in suburbia, Vivarium has drawn comparisons to the movies Being John Malkovich, American Beauty, and Blue Velvet, and the TV shows Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone. The latter's season 5 episode "Stopover in a Quiet Town" is especially like Vivarium, with a premise that reads: "A hung-over couple awaken to find themselves not only in a strange house but in a deserted town, where nothing is as it should be." Like Yonder, everything in this neighborhood is fake — the appliances, the trees, the grass — and the train out of town repeatedly circles back on itself. The couple in it are also the subjects of an outside, alien force, albeit in a different way.
Another blatant inspiration is the 1960 sci-fi horror Village of the Damned, which follows a group of blonde-haired, glowing-eyed children who live in a small village and have frightening powers. These children also share uncertain paternity and grow up very quickly, much like mini-Martin. Funnily enough, Vivarium director Lorcan Finnegan cites very different inspirations in his interview with Phasr: real-life ghost estates in Ireland and a BBC documentary about the lifecycle of the European Cuckoo. Many species of Cuckoos are brood parasites — animals that rely on others to raise their young — and Finnegan compares these animals to real estate agents: "There’s a degree of these false real estate agents that have a symbiotic relationship with humans, and they don’t raise their own young and have to trick young couples to become surrogates for them."
Despite its rich allegories and blockbuster comparisons, Vivarium is criminally underrated, with a score of 5.8 on IMDb and an audience score of 39% on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics favored the movie, rating it 72%, and praised its visuals, clever commentary, and performances. Poots and Eisenberg are brilliant as Gemma and Tom, who make audiences laugh over their bickering and cringe over their handling of their bizarre situation. But the real stars may be the different Martins, played by Aris (realtor Martin), Senan Jennings (mini-Martin #1), and Eanna Hardwicke (mini-Martin #2). The youngest of the three actors, Jennings, offers a particularly unsettling performance that rivals that of Harvey Spencer Stephens' Damien (The Omen, 1976).
Mini-Martin is a terror throughout, but is particularly awful towards the end of the movie when he shows no remorse for a gravely ill Tom and distraught Gemma. As the couple tearfully recount their first date, audiences are given a glimpse into the life they had before mini-Martin, and it sounds perfect. Indeed, Vivarium offers a rather depressing depiction of parenthood which rubbed some viewers the wrong way. "It's not that bad!" some argued, as others laughed and nodded their heads in agreement with Gemma and Tom. Perhaps the former group is to blame for the movie's bad reviews, because Vivarium is a great sci-fi horror that deserves more praise — even if it does have the effect of making some viewers want to tie their tubes.