This week I watched the sci-fi thriller movie Vivarium. I’ve been wanting to see this film for a while now, so I was excited to finally get to watch it. It got a 71% on Rotten Tomatoes so I had high hopes for it. The definition of vivarium is an enclosure prepared for keeping animals under seminatural conditions for observation or study. Without watching any trailers or reading any synopsis, you can tell through the definition of vivarium alone that our characters will be trapped in one way or another.

The movie starts off introducing the two main characters, a couple named Gemma and Tom.  Gemma and Tom decide to take their relationship a step further and look to move in with each other. They arrive at the Yonder office. The man working there, named Martin, pushes an impromptu house tour on the couple. They follow him to the Yonder neighborhood outside the city. All the houses in Yonder are identical single-family homes painted the same shade of green. It wasn’t a nice seafoam green, or a deep forest green, but a sickly washed out tone of green. This is already scary enough for me. The thought of living in a neighborhood where every single house is identical and doesn’t have any character to it is a fear in itself.

Tom and Gemma tour the house but are not completely interested. They’re ready for the tour to be over when they can’t find Martin. They see his car is gone and decide to leave. They get in their car and try to leave Yonder. They do everything they can but can’t seem to find the way out. As they frantically try to search for the exit, they see that no matter what they do they are back where they started outside of house #9. They decide to stay the night in the house and wake up with a package of food at the front door. With no way out and no one around, they’re forced to stay. The next day another box shows up at their doorstep but this time with a baby in inside with a note that tells them “raise the child and you will be released”. At this point, I’m freaking out for them. They’re trapped with no escape and they’re getting mysterious boxes with babies inside.

With no other choice, they start to raise the child. The child isn’t normal and grows very quickly. Definitely not human, I’d say that the child is an alien or monster. In just 3 months, he looks like he is already 7 years old. Tom and Gemma hated the child and greeted him with a middle finger in the morning. Instead of communicating, he constantly screamed at the top of his lungs until he got what he wanted. Like them, I hated the child. He was super creepy and watched them 24/7 and copied everything they did. I wish they would’ve killed it early on in the movie, but for some reason Gemma decided to save it when Tom tried to lock it up. This is the vivarium. The child was studying Gemma and Tom and their every move while stuck in the house. Anyways, I’ve already spoiled a significant portion of the movie so you will have to watch the rest to see how they fare stuck in Yonder with their creepy alien child!

This movie kind of reminded me of how we are today with the global pandemic happening. We are all trapped and housebound bored out our minds like they were. Each day in the movie was very real feeling. Many of the scenes didn’t include music and showed an average day to day of eating breakfast, staring at the child with disdain and then going to bed. Personally, I felt like the movie was a little anticlimactic and I wished there was more action or thrill to it.   

Overall, I’d give Vivarium 6 aliens out of 10.

👽👽👽👽👽👽(6)/10