Critics reviews

You long for [Vivarium] to have a little fun with its dystopia. The audience is left going, “Yes … and?” Gemma and Tom aren’t the only ones who may feel they have been here before.

Vivarium largely works, despite some misgivings. Poots and Eisenberg both prove to be successfully game, infusing their underwritten characters with a genuine physicality and attention to behavioral details that liven things up... Mostly I felt a deep sense of understanding, even empathy, for [the duo].

What causes Vivarium to stumble is its many loose ends left hanging by the time the credits roll... [The film] makes big hints of bigger answers then drops them almost immediately, which proves frustrating given the high stakes it has built for itself.

There are times this feels like a single idea stretched to feature length. But there’s enough visual and thematic invention to keep viewers gripped and unsettled, particularly in these unprecedented, isolated times.

That’s the real horror at the heart of Vivarium: that the conventional idea of a perfect life is less a template and more a trap, that parenthood can be as much a curse as a reward. It’s not an original thought by any means, but it’s expertly executed.

Vivarium is an ingenious, relentless sci-fi horror... beautifully designed and filmed... Essentially a two-hander, it is brilliantly inhabited by Eisenberg (rewardingly cast against nerdy, arrogant type) and Poots.

Finnegan finally exhausts his allegory, and explains too much. An alien plot to undermine society could easily secrete itself in our insane housing market. This trip down the housing ladder into hell, though, fails to complete its coolly hermetic concept.

Finnegan and his cowriter Garret Shanley make no real effort to conceal what is really going on... The source of the oddness – like the hackneyed digs at suburban life – is, however, little more than decoration on a neatly constructed exercise in creative alienation.

“Vivarium” isn’t a fun watch, and not just because it’s generally claustrophobic and insistently bleak. Even less fun: watching a pair of talented actors go through the motions of an exhausted scenario that’s based almost entirely on pat assumptions about how pre-fabricated and insidious modern suburbia is... “Vivarium” is the horror movie equivalent of Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans: easy to reproduce, easier to forget.

Eerie and surprising, Vivarium takes a common cinematic theme — “the suburbs will eat your soul” — and turns it into high-concept horror, anchored by great performances from Eisenberg and Poots.

Poots and Eisenberg, who first appeared together a decade ago in Brian Koppelman’s “Solitary Man,” remain an appealing onscreen couple.

The notion of suburbia as a conformist purgatory of Monopoly houses and manicured lawns isn't exactly a fresh one in literature or the arts or everyday presumption. That it mostly survives as the central theme of Vivarium, a compelling piece of Twilight Zone science fiction, is a testament to how effectively the film teases out its mysteries.