Movie Review: "Vivarium" (2019)

My brother more than often recommends me movies to watch, some of which I have already seen and some of which I have not. Then there are some where I read the marketing piece for the movie, the short synopsis they write to draw you in and then I think 'maybe it's better I try and put this one off for a while...' And I did, for a long while. I got to about a year when my brother texted me the link to watch it. I gave it a few more weeks and then I caved. I watched it. I do not know why I watched it and I thought I would enjoy it a lot more than I did. It felt predictable and the acting was a little bit off from time to time. The concept was very good, I just wish more money was put behind it to find maybe someone better than Imogen Poots to act in the lead role of the film.

As the title suggests, Vivarium is a movie about trapping people in what looks like a social experiment which is based on how birds often take out the natives of a nest and replace the inhabitants with one of their own, forced to raise from the egg - the other birds ultimately accept it but something always feels off. Complicated? Correct. Can it be told in one and a half hours? No. This movie more than often feels like a bit of a mess, somewhat bland and it really does not have any real sense of tension because of the bad acting that comes from the lead actress.

I feel like this movie was trying to do too much in the little time and with the little budget it had. I also found that this little budget had a massive impact on the talents able to be acquired to act in the film. Now, do not get me wrong - Jesse Eisenberg is one of my favourite actors, but there is a difference between putting him in The Double and making him do this. I do not think that this role suited him very much because the role itself was very empty. They would have been better off getting someone who was relatively unknown and then spending more money getting an actress to carry the movie who was better known - maybe like Thomasin McKenzie from Last Night in Soho (2021), or even Florence Pugh. Imogen Poots did not make the slow descent into madness believable and most of the time she looked simply bored or boring.

I also felt like a lot of the movie was simply too obvious. I guessed the vast majority of the events as they were going on because the title, the opening scene and the design simply gave it away far too much. If it was subtle, maybe like the 'snake chasing its own tail' thing in Predestination, then it would be something I could get behind. But not this. I can't get behind something so obvious that I have basically guessed the ending by the time Jesse Eisenberg starts digging the hole. Then, when I waited for everything to unfold, it happened exactly the way I thought it would. Most of the movie felt like it was trying to be smarter than it was and though it works for something that most educated folks don't take seriously anyway (see: Fight Club) - it does not work when you actually mean it.

When this is advertised as a horror but instead winds up being a thriller and then thinks it is too smart for its own good, you know there is something wrong. I feel like that this movie could have been improved in so many places that I simply did not enjoy watching it all that much. The concept was a great feeling of 'this could go somewhere...' though, I didn't hold out much hope, I try to keep an open mind. Ultimately, I could no longer pry my mind open anymore and thus, caved it to feeling just a general sense of boredom.

All in all, I do not think that I will be watching this movie again. It was far too dull and predictable and just tries to be so clever, but ends up ultimately falling flat.