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There is something uniquely chilling about locked room horror movies. These are the films that isolate their characters to a tiny, claustrophobic location and chronicle their slow descent into violent madness, often over an excruciatingly long and deliberate span of time. The only certainty is that escape is always on the distant horizon, with an ocean of terrible torture between it and the damned protagonists. Over the years, numerous gifted directors have put their spin on this distinctive genre, from campy adaptations like Misery (Rob Reiner, 1990), to the infamous Saw (James Wan, 2004), to slasher siege films like Green Room (Jeremy Saulnier, 2015). Vivarium (Lorcan Finnegan, 2020) is the latest successful reimagining of this particular branch of horror, setting itself apart from the crowd by twisting the common themes of imprisonment and fatigue to fit into an inspired new setting: suburbia.
Vivarium stars Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg as Gemma and Tom, a young couple looking to buy their first house, who are unknowingly led into an endless, labyrinthian housing estate called Yonder. They are abandoned here, totally alone, and informed via an ominous delivery package that, if they wish to be set free, they must first raise a child (Senan Jennings) provided to them by their new invisible overlords.
To describe the plot in any further detail than this would be to spoil an ingeniously crafted and sustained trajectory of deafening dread which commences once the two young lovers are forced into reluctant parenthood. Poots and Eisenberg are terrific in their leading roles, with Poots especially delivering a tender and distressing, yet nearly always controlled, performance as the child’s involuntary new mother. Her performance anchors the film, much in the same way that Luptia Nyong’o and Florence Pugh became inseparable from the two horror highlights of 2019, Us (Jordan Peele) and Midsommar (Ari Aster), if not more so due to Finnegan’s preference for tight cinematography which pinpoints every slight breath from his lead performers. It is undeniably through Poots that we are able to trace the emotional chaos of the film, though she is complemented superbly by Eisenberg’s increasingly agitated performance, who is himself tasked with making Tom’s constant fluctuations between fear and aggression into a sympathetic ordeal.
The film is a brutal and exhausting experience, but it also manages to provide some sharp and often hilarious satire about the very nature of nuclear families and the dehumanisation that comes from such categorisation. The first act of the film in particular is loaded with witty dialogue and surprising gags, particularly once the sinister, yet immensely goofy, real estate agent Martin (Jonathan Aris) steps into the frame. This is a film with a flawless handle on its own tone, transitioning between laughs, tears and shocks so effortlessly as to mesmerise in almost every frame from start to finish.
There are minor issues to be had with Vivarium however, particularly in regards to the special effects, which are consistently weak and cartoonish in appearance. The moments featuring these lacklustre effects account for the few distractions which threatened to break my immersion in the film, being made even more obvious by the gritty atmosphere elsewhere. It is worth noting however, that the film was put together with an estimated budget of $4,000,000, which is an understandable roadblock for horror filmmaking. Fortunately, the bulk of the film is not reliant on noticeable digital work, as Finnegan wisely maintains a humanistic focus whenever possible. There is no denying that Vivarium is a work of science-fiction, but in what is presumably an act of financial self-awareness, it plays for the most part more like a particularly horrific drama.
Vivarium is the sort of horror film that has seen something of a resurgence in the last few years, taking a small number of established actors and throwing them into a low-budget scenario transformed into a high stakes thriller by masterful performances and exceptionally clever filmmaking. There are no jump scares in the film, only the suffocating suspense of what these two characters are plotting at any one time and where their journeys might end. The result is an unmissable feat for the genre, taking the classic locked room format and turning it into something traumatically modern in such a way as to showcase the absolute best of what this particular subset of cinema is capable of achieving.
Vivarium is the Virgin Media Opening Gala at the Dublin International Film Festival on February 26 at Cineworld Dublin, Parnell Street. It is in Irish cinemas from March 27.
