Far enough away but close enough, says creepily unreal real estate agent Martin describing Yonder, a Stepford type housing estate symbolic of all the stupefying sterility of suburbia.
Tradie Tom and his wife, pre school teacher, Gemma, are looking to nest and are shepherded to Yonder by Martin, who dresses more like a Mormon missionary than a flash harry realtor. His lack of sartorial style mirrors the bland box dwellings in their staid symmetrical subdivisions that he is selling. Martin shows them number 9 and then vanishes.
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 realise their search for a dream home has plunged them into a terrifying nightmare as their attempts to navigate themselves out of the eerie estate prove impossible.
Irish director, Lorcan Finnegan, teases a taught and terrifying tale out of VIVARIUM, with the crashing of symbols and the tumult of metaphor leavened by the central performances of Jesse Eisenberg and, particularly, Imogen Poots as the lovey dovey cooing couple dropped into a cuckoo’s nest.
What is promoted as the perfect home is a most unaccommodating accommodation particularly when they are foisted an infant to foster. Instant happy family with the most unhappy results. Parenthood is a purgatory and domestic bliss is blitzed.
Tom takes to digging himself out of their predicament, literally, making daily excavation of their front yard, a Sisyphus pursuit, an existential torment. The infant grows more rapidly than real time, burgeoning into a Midwich cuckoo like child, only with dark hair and blank personality. There is the odium of Oedipus.
VIVARIUM ponders the idea of ideal living, of identifying with the identical, of the nature of the individual, our subservience to conformity and the reality that we are being consumed by consumerism.
It prods us to into not taking things for granted, especially the natural world, with its breezes, birdsong and arbours.
VIVARIUM is timely tale in these confronting and confining times.
Available on VOD from April 16.
Google Play, iTunes, Telstra, Fetch and Umbrella Entertainment .
Foxtel on Demand from May 6