Vivarium (2019): The Collaboration of Patriarchy and Capitalism

 Vivarium (2019): The Collaboration of Patriarchy and Capitalism 

Hello! June, the beginning of summer, has started. Living on an island in South Korea, I am enjoying the warm weather and cooling breeze. What is your summer like?

Contrasting to the warm and bright summer weather, today's post is a thriller science fiction movie: Vivarium (2019).

Title: Vivarium

Director: Lorcan Finnegan

Cast: Imogen Poots, Jesse Eisenberg, Senan Jennings

Genre: Horror, Science fiction

Running time: 98 minutes

Language: English

My Rating: 6/10

Before I talk about the movie, I assume that most of you will wonder what Vivarium means. Vivarium means "place of life" in Latin. It refers to an area, usually enclosed, for keeping and raising animals or plants for observation or research. 

Perhaps, this is why the film's opening sequence depicts a newborn baby bird feeding from its mother's mouth as if the audience is observing animals. 

Brief Summary 

    The sci-fi film Vivarium focuses on the inescapable tragic town of Yonder. Finnegan's sci-fi thriller tells the story of a young couple trapped in a frightfully uniform suburban neighborhood that quickly reveals itself to be a nightmare. 

    The film begins as Gemma, a schoolteacher, explains to a child asking about a dead baby bird fallen from its nest that it's "the law of nature." Later, she and her boyfriend Tom, a gardener, visit a real estate agent to look for a house to live in together. They end up following the somewhat peculiar real estate agent, Martin, into a village called Yonder. There, they find themselves trapped in the town comprised of endless rows of wholly identical homes and roads that always lead back to the same place, against a backdrop of artificial and unnatural clouds and sky in that seemingly eerie and unnatural town.

As essential items for living literally emerge and disappear in delivery boxes, even a baby boy is given to them. The child mimics Gemma and Tom's words as he grows, while Tom exhausts himself digging endlessly in the yard, determined to find a way out. Meanwhile, Gemma spends a lot of time with the child. One day, Tom discovers a bag containing a corpse deep in a tunnel, and he dies in the aftermath of that shock.

Before they know it, the boy grows into an adult. While Gemma threatens him with a pickaxe, she falls into a strange space beneath the house. There, the lives of those who probably repeated the same life before are being replayed, with the backdrop being the same 9th house in Yonder. Gemma also dies, and the boy puts her in the bag with the corpse, burying her in the yard again, then leaves Yonder for a human neighborhood. He deals with the dying real estate agent Martin, donning his name tag, and welcomes a new couple, becoming the new "Martin."

    Though still a high school student, I have thought about the concept of family and marriage. Married couples sacrifice their own lives, providing labor to society to earn money to support themselves. Even after raising their children, it's not easy to have money left over when their own lives are over. Whether it's medical expenses or housing costs, people spend the money they've earned through labor on their survival, leaving behind children who will provide labor to society for their entire lives. 

So, is a household just an endless provider of labor to society, with nothing left for us but a community?

In my opinion, although we will finally have nothing left to us, we experience invaluable emotions like love and a sense of belonging. For me, perhaps that is the reason why humans exist and what makes our lives valuable. 

Tom's Life

    The film Vivarium portrays 'normal' life through extreme settings. It's similar to a bird spending its entire life searching for a nest, yet inside, it's all too similar to a human's life. Tom becomes fixated on endlessly dreaming of a 'better home' or 'escape from this place', neglecting what's happening outside. He spends so much time digging in the yard, barely spending any time with Gemma, and eventually dies. It's only at the moment of death that he realizes Gemma was the 'home' he was searching for, ending in a hollow realization. In reality, Tom's actions seem to depict avoidance of confronting the distressing situation with his girlfriend through engaging in familiar tasks like digging, rather than openly discussing it with her. While the extreme circumstances of the movie might make it seem like there were no other options, perhaps Tom could have spent time with Gemma, dancing, conversing, or finding other ways to pass the time.

Gemma's Life

    Gemma takes on the roles of raising a boy (not her son), preparing meals to enable Tom to work all day, and assisting him. This reflects well the roles imposed on women in capitalist societies, as discussed in books like Ivan Illich's book "Shadow Work." Gemma becomes trapped in the role of the "woman who takes care of domestic chores to allow men to work outside." After Tom's death, the revelation of the secrets of Yonder reveals the appearance of a couple who lived the same life in that house before, and the fact that the backdrop is also the 9th house in Yonder suggests that such lives have been repeating not only this time but also in the past.

The Boy's Life

    I find the relationship between the boy, Gemma, and Tom somewhat realistic. While there's the mythical concept of "mothers loving their children unconditionally," the couple in the movie also resent the boy for the situation they find themselves trapped in. In situations where one feels trapped and ends up raising a child they didn't plan for, it's not uncommon for them to unknowingly project their resentment onto the child (but this can never justify child abuse). Moreover, the scene where the child cries and screams for food reminded me of the baby bird crying for food shown in the opening scene of the movie.

 The message conveyed in the final scene is also quite clear: the labor nurtured within their 'home' becomes the workforce that keeps this society running like clockwork.

Overall Review

Actually, the scenes depicted in Vivarium (2019) are somewhat extreme. However, these extreme settings make us feel unfamiliar with the societal structures and repetitive aspects of our lives that we are accustomed to. That seems to be the unique characteristic of this film. 

If we don't consciously strive to live differently, we end up living by inertia (as Gemma refers to it in the movie, "The Law of Nature").

I rated this movie a 6 because while it wasn't boring, it didn't fully convince me either. The storyline wasn't bad, but I felt the producers attempted to infuse a sense of modernity that disturbed my immersion in the film. Still, I would recommend this movie to someone who wants to kill time and likes horror movies. 

I hope you enjoyed today's post! I am planning to write the next post on the new Netflix sci-fi movie Atlas (2024). So stay tuned!