¡QUÉ HORROR! 2020
Candidate #5
VIVARIUM
(May 2019)
“Who did that to the poor baby birds?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was a cuckoo?”
“Why?”
“Because it needed a nest.”
“Why doesn’t it just make its own nest?”
“Because that’s nature. That’s just the way things are.”
“I don’t like the way things are. They’re terrible.”
“I don’t like the way things are. They’re terrible.”
“Well… it’s only horrible sometimes."
This conversation takes place very early on in Lorcan
Finnegan’s sophomore feature, Vivarium.
And as the unsettling opening sequence shows us, it
was indeed a ruthless cuckoo--only being true to its nature--that “… did that
to the poor baby birds”…
That disturbing opening and the subsequent
conversation sets up the film’s scenario, in which Gemma Pierce and her
boyfriend Tom (Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg) are drawn by the “strange and
persuasive motherf*cker,” Martin (Jonathan Aris) to visit Yonder, a new housing
development “just the right distance” away…
And, well… this will not turn out to be their dream home…
You’re home right now.
Quality family homes.
Forever.
--Yonder’s Welcome Sign
Yonder, with its identical model homes and patently
fake skies is suburbia as “ideal” (yet terribly bland), inescapable Hell.
It’s the horrifying picture of being trapped in the
maddening routine of existence, with only the slimmest of hopes as a possible reprieve
from the domestic tyranny of the mortgage, the drip feed, and the hamster wheel.
While you could look at Vivarium as a feature-length Twilight
Zone episode that plays far
better than any of the ten Season 1 episodes from the recent CBS All Access
revival, you could also consider it as a science fiction-tinged expansion of
some of Eraserhead’s thematic
preoccupations, taking those particular concerns to their disquieting,
inevitable conclusions.
“What a lovely sky we have. It is lovely to live under a lovely sky and
a lovely house with lovely houses all around us.”
Parting Shot: The writer’s credit for Vivarium goes to Garret Shanley, from a story
by Shanley and Finnegan.
The pair also collaborated on Finnegan’s debut
feature, Without Name.
That film though, did not grab me in quite the same
way Vivarium did…
I am now definitely
looking forward to whatever these two get up to next…
(Vivarium OS’
courtesy of screenanarchy.com & impawards.com.)