Vivarium: five small details that are more significant than you think
Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots live through a Stepford Wives-style suburban nightmare in surreal head-scratched Vivarium, which has just landed on Shudder.
The movie questions gender roles and family ideals through
the prism of reality-bending housing developments and mutant alien children.
It’s very much open to interpretation, but here are five
small details which could be more significant than you think.
Warning: Spoilers ahead
1/ What’s a vivarium?
According to the Oxford dictionary, a vivarium is "an
enclosure, container, or structure adapted or prepared for keeping animals
under semi-natural conditions for observation or study or as pets". It ties in
with the movie’s uncanny aesthetics – the fluffy clouds, windless skies and
picture book sunsets all seem ‘semi-natural’.
The idea a vivarium is for observation or study also
highlights the film’s role in picking apart the dream of the nuclear family.
It’s no coincidence that one poster for the movie riffs on the iconic one-sheet
for Cabin in the Woods. Like the
teens in that film, Tom and Gemma are placed in an artificial environment for
observation - in this case by us, the viewer.
2/ What’s with the cuckoos?
The footage that plays over the opening titles shows freshly
hatched baby birds hurled out of their nest by a parasitic cuckoo. It’s clearly
an omen of what’s to come as The Boy takes over Tom and Gemma’s lives.
It’s doubly ironic that Tom later buries the dead birds with
a shovel, since the hole he digs in the Yonder will later house his and Gemma’s
corpses. In this metaphor, Tom and Gemma are not just the parents cluelessly
feeding the invader cuckoo that’s murdered their real children, they’re also
the baby birds which the cuckoo mercilessly kills.
3/ Number 9?
I thought this was a cheeky reference to British horror-comedy TV show Inside Number 9, which has a similar sense of humour and uncanny surrealism. It actually appears to be nothing of the sort.
Director Lorcan Finnegan told Collider: “The number nine does appear in
all sorts of occult stuff. If you imagine drawing the number nine, it’s like
going into a circle, and it then becomes a loop.” So the number is actually one
more representation of how Tom and Gemma are trapped in the Yonder.
4/ Don’t eat the strawberries
For me, the moment Tom and Gemma return to Number 9 and help
themselves to the complimentary champagne and strawberries is actually the
moment they seal their fates – due to its echoing of Greek mythology.
In the story of the abduction of Persephone by king of the
underworld Hades, the moment Persephone becomes trapped in the underworld is
when she eats a few pomegranate seeds. In Vivarium,
after Tom and Gemma eat the fruit the shit also hits the fan. That’s when
The Boy turns up, signalling they too are trapped in a kind of hell.
5/ Digging deeper
The latter half of the film sees Tom become obsessed with
digging his way out of the Yonder, which eventually poisons him. He notes the
conventional layers of soil (topsoil, subsoil, bedrock) are absent, and it’s
all the same no matter how far he digs.
This can be seen as a reference to the opening sequence of Blue Velvet, another film which casts a satirical eye over near-perfect suburbia. While in that film the camera burrows underneath the perfect grass and picket fences to reveal rot and cockroaches, Tom’s attempt to uncover what really lies beneath the surface of suburbia draws up a blank.
Suburbia in Vivarium is
all surface and no depth. Instead of exposing the horrors that lurk beneath a
perfect family life, it actually focuses on how hollow the ideal of the nuclear
family is. The uncanny child Tom and Gemma are gifted with ends up destroying
them both, reminding us to be careful what we wish for.
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