Just yesterday my cinefile friend Bernie at Reely Bernie and I were discussing today’s featured movie Vivarium. Like him I only ‘quasi-liked’ it after first viewing, although the premise intrigued me and lingered somewhere in the recesses. Upon subsequent viewings of Vivarium with my precocious 8 year-old daughter Katherine Rose, my opinion changed where I found it unabashedly relatable to my life and bizarrely omnipresent somehow; which is not to discount the plethora of its detractors’, hence it’s IMDB score of 5.9.

There is something in this movie which will remain with me forever like I’m stuck in it somehow and remains part of me. I hope somehow someone can rescue me from it. I will be waiting.

Vivarium is similar to other peculiar movies which create their own universe and meaning (or lack there of) à la Being John Malkovich (reviewed here in 2021) and the Norwegian movie Den Brysomme Mannen (The Bothersome Man). There will be some spoilers in my article below, so you have been forewarned in case you wanted to see Vivarium.

IMDB Storyline:
A young couple is thinking about buying their starter home. And to this end, they visit a real estate agency where they are received by a strange sales agent, who accompanies them to a new, mysterious, peculiar housing development to show them a single-family home. There they get trapped in a surreal, maze-like nightmare.

As a viewer I too could sense the claustrophobia and lack of purpose which encapsulates the protagonists’ plight and pervades their consciousness. This is a horror film, but unlike any stereotypical horror film one might be accustomed. Despite being spat into the dark recesses of a macabre labyrinth designed to subject the victims to ‘slow-burning’ psychological trauma and decay; paradoxically there is an unnerving sense of a ‘futile’ freedom in their abandonment, isolation and illusion that they can do anything they want since there is apparently no direct oversight or retributions for actions including the following:

• burning a house down, but only to find it reemerge from the ashes the day after,
• driving around in circles to find they always end up from where they begin, and
• excavating their front lawn; to find this perverse (and unique) purpose fulfils the end goal of the ‘maker’ of having them dig their own grave for their impending demise. Happy days!

I found the actors, with the exception of Jessenberg (who I felt was miscast – did they require a big name?) gave very credible performances. The young boy and his adult-self felt obscenely real as ‘android’ nightmare facilitators. There are frequent scenes where Jessenberg’s character lights the tail-end of cigarettes in order to combat his stress which seems to associate the world of addiction to the harrowing confines of their maze. Also the relentless deluge of suffering through lack of purpose and meaning is so horrifyingly captured that I felt compelled to reflect on my own existence and examine whether what I am doing is aimed at indulging in self gratification and expedient dopamine hits (for however long that will last) in lieu of pursuing the ‘whole meaningful’ thing. See more here.

The universe presented in Vivarium is a ‘Hell’; one vastly distinct from the ‘Hell’ which emanates from the classic Bible telling: Gehenna is ‘Hell’ as it is translated in the new testament – Gehenna is a valley in the south – east of Jerusalem that symbolised death and destruction. It was here that child sacrifices to Moloch were performed. See the book of Kings in the old testament (2 Kings 16:3 and 21:6).
The ‘Hell’ in Vivarium seems more relatable to our current predicament living in a secular (rationalist – materialist) society largely void of classical moral and virtue teachings passed down from ancient times. This ‘Hell’ of a ghastly insignificant daily routine nestled in an existence lacking in any moral governance / guidance is as scary as anything put to us previously.

What I learnt from Vivarium besides the above, is if I found myself compelled to live with just one other person in such a ‘hell-hole’ as this movie portrays and their choice had also been stripped from them, I would be comforted in knowing it was either my daughter Katherine or my son Jesus Mateo to share it with. They have always been the angels on my shoulder, the apples of my eye and my shelter from the storm. They give me the most meaning, you see.
For further information, see ‘I Won’t Forget‘.
Thanks for reading.

References:
1. Vivarium (film) – Wikipedia
2. Vivarium (2019) – IMDB