Vivarium

 Saw Vivarium, a film about a young couple who get trapped in a cookie-cutter suburb while house-hunting.  After establishing that they are well and truly trapped in this maze of identical passages, a baby arrives with instructions that if they raise it, they will be released.  The film also opens with a cuckoo bird shoving eggs and nest-mates out of the nest, and being fed at a gigantic size by its surrogate mother, so it's clear what the themes are here.

The film mines a lot of surreal mood and creepiness from the identical houses of the suburban development, and from the bland stand-in décor of these empty homes.  There's impersonal vacuum-sealed food and vaguely indifferent and slightly hostile salesmen.  The film has modern alienation on the mind, and when better to release such a film than during lockdown, when all of our lives have shrunk to the same few hundred square feet, the same one or two people?  To complete the picture, they should have also been able to watch TV.

The film is most interesting in terms of just seeing what happens.  We get a little into the claustrophobia and the toll this takes on their relationship, but it's less a character study than it is an existential struggle to matter in an empty, implacable, prefab world.  I really liked the few arbitrary flickers of defiance they put up as their trap becomes more complete.  The guy takes to digging forever, and although the woman tries to understand the growing child, she also howls at the sky.

Anyway, the film is alright.  The ending delivers some nice visuals as the curtain is pulled aside for just a moment, and there's some great black humor (there's a corpse that's delivered with a receipt!)  but this is the sort of film you can really only see once.  It's fairly bleak and paranoid.  The sun is out and the lawn is green, but they are clearly in a trap that is closing in around them and this is a matter of life and death.  But isn't that how it is for us all?  As we get older, the possibilities become more limited and we slowly settle into our final resting places.  Maybe the suburbs aren't such a bad place to wind up.