Many times, movies are effective because they make you feel what the characters are feeling. They immerse you in the emotions and revelations of their story such that you become personally invested. You may feel fear watching a character be chased by mysterious predator. You might break down with tears of joy watching a mother reunite with her long-lost daughter. This ability to elicit empathy from a viewer often makes a film a more rewarding experience.
But there's a different kind of shared feeling in some films, one that's not as positive or satisfying. One where the film itself almost seems to be a real-life proxy for the threat looming over its main characters.
Take Vivarium, Saban Films' recent video-on-demand release, for example.
In Vivarium, young couple Tom and Gemma (Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots) are shopping for a home together when they come across Yonder, a sprawling suburban subdivision comprised of identical rows of sickly green houses. After an uncomfortable encounter with a bizarre, nearly robotic real estate agent, the two attempt to leave the compound, only to realize they can't find their way out of the increasingly hellish labyrinth of domesticity. What ensues is a Twilight Zone-esque descent into monotonous madness, as Tom and Gemma try to escape—or merely survive—their new prison.
But unlike The Twilight Zone, which were most often tight, 22-minute bites, Vivarium clocks in at a sluggish 90-some minutes. And when the film's primary (or only) mode of terror and paranoia is mundanity, I find myself in a similar trap to Gemma's and Tom's, but while their cage is Yonder, mine is Vivarium.
The 50-minute mark feels more like 2-hours-plus, and the film rarely deviates from standard exploration of how a couple might work together or fall apart under strange and extreme circumstances of survival. Poots and Eisenberg pull their weight, but frankly, Gemma and Tom aren't interesting enough characters to make the journey into madness anything more than mind-numbing.
Director Lorcan Finnegan displays sufficient skill on a technical level, framing his characters in visually interesting ways to emphasize Yonder's ethereal tedium. But the story and dialogue by Finnegan and writer Garret Shanley fail to provide enough humanity in Gemma and Tom to invest in.
The only reprieve from the ever-increasing tedium comes in the film's final ten to fifteen minutes, when secrets begin to reveal themselves and psyches begin to unravel. Psychedelic, surreal imagery and disturbing sound design help heighten the intensity of the couple's plight as they near the answers to their questions, but it's ultimately not enough to make the previous 85-percent of the film worthwhile, and it's not much you haven't seen before anyway.
Vivarium isn't the kind of subpar movie that upset me—it just bored me to tears. And to be honest, that might actually be worse, at least right now, while we're all trapped in our own homes, longing for a more colorful and active world outside.