Vivarium Rewrites The Twilight Zone

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.

Check out the trailer for Vivarium:

Vivarium centers on Gemma (Imogen Poots) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg), a couple who seem somewhat ambivalent about progressing into “normal” adulthood—i.e., getting married, buying a house in the suburbs, having a baby. The market’s good for home buying, though, so, almost despite themselves, they wander into a store where houses in a development called “Yonder” are up for sale. Although the salesperson, Martin (Jonathan Aris), insists that “Yonder” represents a “diverse community,” the identical scaled model houses on display seem to belie his rote sales pitch.

Again, deciding without really deciding, Gemma and Tom drive out to Yonder with Martin. When they get there, the homes look as eerily identical as the models in the store. And the housing development is deserted. Martin shows Gemma and Tom Number 9—and then, at some point, leaves them there. Trying with increasing desperation to get out of Yonder, Gemma and Tom find they can’t; they drive around and around the unnervingly indistinguishable houses and streets until they run out of gas. Gemma and Tom are stuck.

As time goes on, they get deliveries of plastic-looking food that has no taste. The day that most transforms their identical days in their identical home, though, is the day get a baby in a box. The boy is theirs to care for now, although it soon becomes clear that he is no normal boy. The lives of Gemma and Tom grind inexorably on—unchanging except for the development of the child and Tom’s digging an ever-deepening hole in their front yard. Is this the only way they can escape?

You should watch Vivarium, but perhaps less to find out what happens—since the fates of Gemma and Tom seem infused with a grim inevitability from the beginning—but to watch every moment of their lives in “Yonder” unfold. Poots and Eisenberg do a fantastic job of rendering the emotions of every stage of their unrelieved entrapment—and the set design, cinematography, and directing are consistently stunning.

Vivarium serves, moreover, as a stark allegory of the ways in which that “normal” adulthood, about which Gemma and Tom were so ambivalent, can sneak up on you and crush you. When Gemma and Tom get the box with the baby inside, it comes with a note: “Raise the child and be released.” But what does it mean, exactly, to “raise” a child? When is it done? When are you released? When Gemma, later in the film, has a moment of existential crisis, asking, “What am I?”, the answer is “You are a mother. You prepare your child for the world.” But when does that end? And what does it mean if you lose everything else in the process? If Without Name served as a commentary on the human destruction of the forest and increasing detachment from nature, Vivarium looks at where we are instead—where we live, who we are–when we have indeed excised all “nature” from our lives. That place, those lives, are terrifying.

You can watch Without Name on Amazon:

“Stopover in a Quiet Town,” The Twilight Zone

I want to end by noting that part of Vivarium’s brilliance for me is the way it echoes what I think is one of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone, season five’s “Stopover in a Quiet Town.” (And Garret Shanley was apparently “inspired” in some way, however subconsciously, by the episode.)[i]

Written by Earl Hamner Jr. and directed by Ron Winston, “Stopover in a Quiet Town” aired on Friday April 24, 1964. It features a New York couple who, after a particularly festive party, wake up in a strange bed in a strange house in what they soon discover is a very strange town. They have no memory of getting there and have no idea where they are. As Bob (Barry Nelson) and Millie (Nancy Malone) Frazier explore the house and the town, they discover it’s completely deserted and that the food, appliances, animals, trees, and grass are all fake. They think they discover a solitary man in a car but it’s a mannequin. They think they manage to get on a train out of town, but it just chugs round in a circle until they’re back where they started. At the end, we discover, in a classic Twilight Zone twist, that Bob and Millie are merely “pets” in a play town for a gigantic child of another species on another planet.

That Vivarium may involve a similar scenario is never made clear—but it’s possible. And it would explain the title. Vivarium is defined as, “a place, such as a laboratory, where live animals or plants are kept under conditions simulating their natural environment, as for research.”

Are Tom and Gemma being held as subject of an experiment, as “pets,” by some alien race? Maybe. The film’s connection to “Stopover” hints that, from the very beginning, nothing in Vivarium may have been what it seemed. And certainly they are in an environment that only “simulates” their “natural” one. One intriguing difference between the two, though, is that, in some sense at least, Gemma and Tom appear to “choose” their fate, while Millie and Bob in “Stopover” are wrenched from their lives completely against their knowledge and will.

There are direct references in Vivarium, large and small, to Twilight Zone’s “Stopover”: in both, the women drive (which kind of becomes an issue in both); in both, the couples travel in circles, thinking they’re getting away but finding themselves back where they started; both couples are trapped in utterly deserted places; in both, the artificial food bears only a superficial resemblance to real food; in both, despairing characters think at some point that they’re actually dead and in hell; and, in both, characters realize—making some larger symbolic point—that literally nothing around them is “real.”

A particularly striking moment in both Vivarium and “Stopover” is when both sets of characters make discoveries involving fire and (fake) grass. In “Stopover,” after Millie despairingly proclaims that nothing in the town is real, Bob points to nature—to trees and grass—to prove her wrong. However, when he flicks a match onto the grass, he discovers that, in fact, it too is fake. “Why, this isn’t grass. It’s papier mâché.”

Tom and Gemma make the same discovery when a cigarette gets thrown on grass and then burns unnaturally to reveal a circle of some yellow plastic substance. In both of these scenes, characters learn that they are, indeed, in some sort of “vivarium,” something most definitely not “real.” They are moments that crystallize for the characters the need to escape—however futile that escape might turn out to be.

I’ve said only a fraction of what can be said about the utterly intriguing Vivarium–and I urge you to watch it for yourself!

[i] Personal correspondence with Lorcan Finnegan, March 10, 2020.

You can stream Vivarium on Amazon: