There's a folkloric aspect to both of these tales. Cut off from society and trapped in their swiftly devaluing home, the couple feels the weight of encroaching nature retaking the space, roots ripping up pavement and vines covering vacant lots, until they must either join or be consumed by it. His short film Foxes, which, like Vivarium, is also available on Amazon Prime, also features a young couple trapped in a neighborhood of empty, identical homes, except this one was inspired by the epidemic of "ghost estates" across Ireland: barren housing developments that were built during the economic boom of the Celtic Tiger, and subsequently left vacant in the aftermath of the late-aughts global recession. If you want to go deeper, director Lorcan Finnegan used the bones of another project of his to flesh out his newest, which originally premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019.
"That's how it is," Gemma explains to one of her preschool students when it asks about the villainy of the cuckoo's life cycle. It's never actually explained where they come from, why they're here, or what their actual purpose is beyond simply reproduction, but one gets the sense that they've been around for quite a while, feeding off of humanity's skill in child-rearing.
The creatures of Vivarium, whatever they are, are similar, using humans to do all the work to supervise their survival. The unwitting parents are driven to exhaustion feeding their adoptive child's enormous appetite, and often perish. Instead, they surreptitiously lay their egg inside the nest of another bird, and the baby, once it hatches, quickly seizes control of the family unit. Many species of cuckoo are brood parasites, meaning the cuckoo parents don't actually care for the cuckoo babies. After pushing first an egg and then one of its fellow birdlings out of the nest and onto the ground, the large baby, which turns out to be a baby cuckoo, gets the parents' full attention, growing bigger and fatter while barely fitting inside the nest. At the very start of the movie, we see images of a nest of tiny baby birds - except one of them isn't so tiny. What happens is more or less straightforward, but to understand its purpose, and to find a very ominous clue, you have to go back to the beginning. Soon enough, Gemma is "released" as well, and their "boy," who is now more of a man, gases up their car, drives himself out of the housing development and back to the fateful real estate agency, where he takes up his aged fellow's post, pinning on his nametag and sitting down to wait for an unsuspecting couple to walk through his doors. Thumped back into her own dimension, she can only wail as her charge "releases" the dead body of Tom, zipping him inside a body bag and tossing him into the hole he spent his last days obsessively digging. Some have given up, some have committed suicide, and some simply sit at their kitchen tables staring. In the final 20 or so minutes, Gemma, determined to find out where her horrid adoptee goes every day and who he's meeting in their deserted suburban wilderness, slips after him underneath a portion of pulled-up sidewalk and finds herself tumbling through different-colored pocket universes, each inhabited by other sets of despairing, unwilling "parents" to identically clothed little black-haired boys. Unwilling to accept their fate, Tom and Gemma each descend into their own forms of madness, and the ending of the movie features a psychedelic journey through multiple realities and a final scene that's as mysterious as it is brutal. Like creatures out of The Twilight Zone, these beings lure Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) and Gemma (Imogen Poots) into a labyrinth walled-in by mint green cookie-cutter houses, promising that they'll be "released" once their charge has reached adulthood. Unlike your typical 21st century suburban nightmare, the couple also finds themselves enslaved to a race of interdimensional humanoids, forced to nurture one of their kind as it grows, with unnatural swiftness, from infant to adult. In Vivarium, a young couple finds themselves drawn into and trapped inside a 21st century suburban nightmare: a neighborhood populated by an endless sprawl of homes of the exact same size and shape, isolated from the world and crushed by the brutal sameness of their surroundings. This piece contains spoilers for Vivarium.
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