Vivarium

Vivarium follows Gemma and Tom, a young couple looking for their first home together. A peculiar real estate agent, Martin, persuades them to visit a new housing development, where every house looks exactly the same. When the agent vanishes, the two cannot find their way out of the neighbourhood, and they soon discover they are expected to raise a child there — one that is not their own and that grows at an unsettling rate.

The film is directed by Lorcan Finnegan from a screenplay by Garret Shanley, and it was his second feature, arriving between Defaced and Nocebo in his catalogue of directed work. Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg play Gemma and Tom, with Senan Jennings and Éanna Hardwicke as the boy at different ages, Jonathan Aris as Martin and Côme Thiry as the baby. Producers were Brendan McCarthy and John McDonnell, and the production drew on Belgian, Danish, Irish and American backing.

Made for a modest budget of four million dollars, the film occupies a small-scale space in genre cinema. Its ratings sit in the middle range: on IMDb it holds 5.9 from around 89,000 votes, and on TMDB 6.1 from a few thousand. A critics' rating of 6.6 from 155 reviews places it slightly above the audience scores, suggesting reviewers were somewhat more receptive to its allegorical approach than general viewers were.