If you're wondering what it takes to get a movie made just look at the number of executive producers and production companies behind "Vivarium". Fundamentally, it's an Irish film but with input from Belgium and Denmark as well. The setting, of course, is everywhere and nowhere since "Vivarium" is a horror-cum-sci-fi picture and its appalling Yonder, where every house and every street is identical, could be anywhere or nowhere. Stepford, perhaps?
Gemma and Tom are the young couple in search of their first home and Martin is the deeply weird, almost not quite human, estate agent who shows them around 'Number 9'. The thing is they don't like the house, the area or Martin but when they try to leave they find they can't. Lorcan Finnegan's movie is a fantasy that's grounded in a kind of reality thanks only to the lived-in performances of Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg as the young couple trapped in a nightmare from which there is no escape and things get even weirder, if that's possible, when a baby turns up on the doorstep of the house they thought they had just burned down and grows up into a strapping, screaming broth of a boy almost overnight.
The problem with "Vivarium" is that there is enough material here for maybe a decent episode of "The Twilight Zone" that's now been stretched to over ninety minutes and despite Poots and Eisenberg's best efforts it gets boring very quickly and it didn't take me long to figure out why it took so many people to get this misbegotten project off the ground. Let's just say "Vivarium" is a hard-sell. On the plus side Senan Jennings is very good as the child from hell before he grows up to be Eanna Hardwicke.
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