Shown at festivals in 2019 and released widely in March 2020, Vivarium is the second feature by Irish director Lorcan Finnegan and writer Garret Shanley. It’s a brilliant, albeit devastatingly bleak film that also happens to echo—as so many horror films do—one of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone.
Finnegan and Shanley’s first feature, Without Name (2016), is an eerie folk horror tale about a surveyor (Alan McKenna) who travels to the woods outside Dublin in order to assess it for development. Once there, though, he meets unwelcoming locals and an equally unwelcoming forest, which seems (at first, at least) resistant to his encroachment. As I said in my review, Without Name is slow-paced and eerie, and I’ve seen few films that so expertly draw on the landscape as a real force in the drama; shot in the awe-inspiring Glendalough National Park in County Wicklow, Ireland, it is a beautiful film.
Finnegan and Shanley’s second feature, Vivarium, is completely different. It is, however, equally provocative, and it’s a film you should be equally sure to watch. Vivarium is less akin to Finnegan and Shanley’s first feature than to their earlier short film, Foxes (2012), which you can watch here, and in which a couple is trapped in a housing estate and then lured away by foxes. It’s an enigmatic film that shares Vivarium‘s setting—a soulless housing estate.
