Vivarium (2019)

Lorcan Finnegan's Vivarium deposits Gemma and Tom, a schoolteacher and a landscaper, into Yonder, a development of identical houses in identical rows, and then declines to let them leave. A real estate agent named Martin vanishes mid-tour. The streets loop. The food arrives vacuum-sealed and tastes of nothing. In time a box delivers a child, and the child grows with unseemly haste and calls Gemma Mother, a title she refuses with the flat conviction of someone who has read the job description.

The film's social consciousness is narrow and mostly architectural. Yonder is a satire of tract housing, of the starter home as a promise that curdles, and there is a modest contempt here for the machinery that sells identical lives to hopeful buyers. That contempt never hardens into an economic argument. Gemma's resistance to imposed motherhood carries a certain weight, and Imogen Poots plays her with a weary competence the script does not always deserve, but the horror of the role is treated as existential rather than political. Nobody convenes a panel. Nobody learns a lesson about the patriarchy.

Which brings us to the matter of instruction. This is a film that withholds, that refuses to explain its throat sacs and its buried corpses and its gravity-defying corridors, and it extends that same reticence to its themes. There is no sermon. There is no closing argument. There is a pickaxe and a hole in the lawn. The cast is white, the anxieties are domestic, and the only history being revised is the history of the suburbs, mildly. We are left with a parable that trusts the audience to assemble its own meaning, which is either admirable restraint or an abdication, and after two viewings I remain undecided.