VIVARIUM: Official Poster and Trailer for Lorcan Finnegan's Sci Fi Satire

Tom and Gemma (Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots) are looking for the perfect home. When a strange real-estate agent takes them to Yonder, a mysterious suburban neighborhood of identical houses, Tom and Gemma can’t leave quick enough. But when they try to exit the labyrinth-like housing development, each road takes them back to where they started. Soon, they realize their search for a dream home has plunged them into a terrifying nightmare, in this taut thriller filled with white-knuckle suspense.

Vivarium proceeds in earnest to examine the entire life-cycle of the post WWII ‘middle class dream’ with a dry kind of savagery, and a diorama visual sense that recalls Swedish auteur Roy Andersson. 

 

Like a good Twilight Zone episode, Tom and Gemma are cursed with the knowledge of the real world is like, making things much, much worse.

 

The movie belongs to Imogen Poots, who, in spite of how awful and unfathomable the child is (they never name it), finds herself grudgingly forming a maternal bond that wavers between a tentative, caring curiosity and exasperated hate. She sets the tone of the household and family dynamic, and really the film. She is harried and human and barely holding things together, living out a mockery of her vague domestic dream.