I went back to the well of movies that will probably be bad, but I can not resist. I saw an advertisement for it on the home screen on my Amazon fire, so I decided it was worth the one hundred minutes of my time. As it turns out, it was only worth about an hour of time, after that it went downhill as the creativity died. All I had done was read the premise, so I hoped there was going to be more of a haunting element in the story, but it failed to bring that potential to life. It had potential, it even caused chills at some points, but at the end of the day it fell short.
The premise of the movie is a young couple, Tom and Gemma, played by Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots, which is an amazing name, were looking for a house and ended up in a real estate office with the oddest/creepiest relator of all time. They follow him to a neighborhood that they did not really want a tour of, and they end up being abandoned in the house and in the neighborhood that now has no exit and goes on forever. The neighborhood is filled with a copy of the ugliest house one after the other. The house is a sickly light green that looks like it is made of cardboard, the yards look like they are made of turf, and even the sky has a fake hue with scattered clouds that do not even look real, and this is the world in which they get trapped. It has scenes that are reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project. For example when they first realize they are trapped they go try taking multiple routes to leave the neighborhood, but end up at the house they toured every time, then the next day, they try to walk in one direction from sun up to sun down, and they end up back where they started.
The movie takes an odd twist when they are left a baby to raise that ages at an quick rate, it only gets odder due to the fact that once the baby gets to about the age of nine or ten in 98 days, he extremely mimicking and has a terribly annoying habit of screaming at the top of his lungs. He starts to tear a rift between Tom and Gemma as well as their monotonous life that never seems to change. As the kid grows, it is obvious that he is growing up to replace the other real estate agent. After more time spent with the kid, the movie gets boring, and I found myself looking at my phone more. If they would have made the real estate agent a serial killer that was hunting them down in this infinite loop, or they could have even made the kid more evil, it could have worked in a more effective way. Also towards the end of the movie, Jesse Eisenberg’s character has an emotional moment, but it just did nothing for me. It provoked no emotion other than the thought that the movie was probably getting close to ending.
The movie does have pandemic like features to it, the couple is essentially trapped in place where each day feels like the last, and they are not coming into contact with any other humans, except for the child that they receive. Their situation seems more hellish than the situation Andy Samberg was placed into in Palm Springs. One theme that was brought up in both of them, was the moral good nature of humanity, there were times in Vivarium where they definitely wanted to kill the kid, but they still looked at him as another human and could not ever bring him to real harm.
Overall the movie was okay. As I mentioned, there was wasted potential, and they could have taken the story in different, better directions. I gave it a 70 ranking, mainly due to its ability to have the initial draw in to the story and create some chilling moments of placing yourself in the situation that they went through. I am definitely a sucker for bad horror films and am willing to give them a try, even if they seem like they do not have much of a chance of being good, so I would recommend watching it once, but after that, it is probably not worth revisiting again.
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