"Vivarium" is one of those movies that pulls you in with an interesting concept but leaves you questioning everything, especially the choices the characters make. The story follows a couple who find themselves trapped in a seemingly endless suburban neighborhood, forced into a bizarre and unsettling routine. The mystery keeps you engaged, but the characters’ decisions often feel frustrating. Not in a "bad script" way, but in a way that makes you wonder if they were written to be this passive on purpose. The pacing leans toward slow-burn horror, relying more on psychological unease than traditional scares. The directing does a solid job of maintaining tension, making the whole thing feel claustrophobic and surreal. The cinematography enhances this with sterile, repetitive visuals that emphasize the artificiality of their world. Acting-wise, Imogen Poots delivers a strong performance, while Jesse Eisenberg brings his usual style, which sometimes works but occasionally feels forced. The real standout is the child actor, his unsettling presence adds a lot to the film’s eerie atmosphere. There’s a lot of subtlety in how he moves and reacts, making you wonder whether his voice was altered or dubbed over in post. The script keeps things cryptic, and while that works for the tone, it also leaves some moments feeling underdeveloped. The lack of clear explanations may frustrate some viewers, but it’s clear that the movie is more about the experience than the answers. The sound design plays a big role in the tension, using unsettling audio cues to make certain scenes even more uncomfortable. Overall, Vivarium is a strange, thought-provoking film that raises more questions than it answers. If you like psychological horror with a heavy dose of surrealism, it’s worth a watch. Just don’t expect everything to make sense.

A young couple go to an estate agent to seek out their dream home. They encounter the almost robotic "Martin" who offers to show them their ideal residence - and so off go Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg to inspect. They discover a typical detached house in the suburbs, surrounded by identical homes that leave them a bit cold. When their guide disappears, they decide to go home - except; they are caught in a labyrinthine network of streets that always brings them back to "No. 9". Soon, a baby in a box arrives and their happiness ought to be complete - except they have no other human contact and so slowly, but surely, start to go a bid mad. The kid has an infuriating habit of screaming loudly when he doesn't get what he wants - and I felt much like screaming myself as the cyclical pointlessness of this really dreary film did start to get on my nerves. Perhaps Lorcan Finnegan intended the potency of the sterility of the whole thing to engender a feeling of irritation from his audience; if he did then top marks. Otherwise, this is a total waste of the talents of two actors who could have found better ways to help us pass 100 minutes.

Vivarium was eerie and creepy, and definitely a movie that will mess with your head, albeit probably in ways other than you anticipated. You'll be tricked in the beginning into believing this movie is actually a sociological observation of the slow and robotic death of suburban life: you and your nuclear family settle into middle class conformity in a large, seemingly endless design of mazes and hedges, condemned to repeat the endless cycle of home, school (or work), home, sleep, rinse and repeat. And it certainly gives one those unsettling vibes, especially when the creepy box with the build-a-baby arrives at their prison doorsteps. Rather, this is something else entirely. While it does well maintaining that nearly subtle sense of wrongness, of something being terribly just _off_, in the end, you may find yourself somewhat disappointed, as it is at this precise moment the film becomes like every other movie of its kind out there. Quite possibly, it is the end that is the most disturbing, for it seems to insinuate that humanity is as disposable as livestock.