Vivarium

3.5★

Vivarium is what happens when a two-sentence creepypasta gets trapped in a suburban housing development and somehow stretches itself into a feature-length existential crisis.

The premise is fantastic. Genuinely one of those ideas that makes you pause halfway through and think, “Yeah, if this happened to me I’d be cooked.” The endless rows of identical houses, the artificial sky, the complete absence of anything remotely human—it all taps into a very specific kind of modern horror that feels less like a nightmare and more like a panic attack generated by urban planning.

What I appreciated most was how committed the movie is to its bit. It never really explains itself in a satisfying way, which I think works more often than it doesn’t. The unknown is infinitely more disturbing than a lore dump.

That said, I found myself admiring the concept more than the actual experience of watching it. The movie intentionally traps the audience in the same repetitive cycle as the characters, which is effective, but also means parts of it start feeling emotionally flat. At a certain point, I understood the misery so thoroughly that I didn’t need another reminder.

Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots do a lot with very little, and the child might be one of the most deeply irritating beings ever put on screen. Not in a bad performance way. In a “I would immediately walk into traffic if I had to deal with this for a week” way.

By the end, I wasn’t terrified or devastated. Just weirdly empty. Which, to be fair, might be exactly what the movie was aiming for.

An interesting film. A memorable film. A film that made me look at suburban neighborhoods differently for about three days.

Never trusting a cul-de-sac again.