Episode Transcript
Hello hello! Welcome to the Final Girl on 6th Ave podcast. I am your host, Carolyn Smith-Hillmer and this week I have a special treat for you, particularly after being gone for the past 2 weeks. Did you miss me? But first, I want to start out by telling you that I am very excited to announce that this very show is now a part of the Morbidly Beautiful network. The Morbidly Beautiful network was founded on the basis of loving the art of the horror genre. The founder and editor-in-chief, Stephanie Malone, is a rotten tomatoes approved critic, which is just amazing and such a privilege to be a part of the same network as them. The Morbidly Beautiful network has many amazing podcast shows, writers, editors, designers and so much more. To check out more about this incredible network, please go to morbidlybeautiful.com.
This week, I am going to be talking about 2019 film Vivarium. I had to take a break of Yorgos Lanthomos and I am sure you are excited about that too. But don’t worry, he still has other movies I can fill your brain with dread about very soon. But this week we are going to be discussing Lorcan Finnegan’s 2019 film Vivarium. Vivarium is science fiction horror film in which “A young couple looking for the perfect home find themselves trapped in a mysterious labyrinth-like neighborhood of identical houses.” As per our bible iMDB. This movie feels especially relevant now given the housing market and crazy surge in new home purchases over the last few years. Our stars are Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg, a personal favorite of mine.
The movie opens with a bird nest, showing two baby birds. The two babies look nothing alike, and the resident baby bird gets kicked out of the nest by the invading baby bird. The mother bird comes back with a worm to feed her kiddo and feeds it to the invading baby bird. This baby bird grows into a fully grown bird that looks completely different from the mother bird and the mother continues to feed it, thinking it is her own. We get the title screen, and immediately cut to Gemma (played by Imogen Poots) teaching her class of elementary school children about trees. After school. Gemma is approached by a fellow teacher who asks her how the house search is going. She explains they haven’t found anything yet and goes on to see a student looking at a dead bird that fell from a tree on the school property. Gemma explains that maybe a cuckoo killed the bird because it needed a nest. The student tells Gemma she doesn’t like the way the world is. Gemma goes on to find her boyfriend, Tom, trimming tree branches on the school property. They bury the dead bird in a very shallow grave.
When packing up his tools, Gemma asks if he is going to change his t shirt because he stinks. They arrive at a real estate office and meet Martin, the salesman of a lifetime. He could sell shit to a dog, but also make you feel upset by his mannerisms in the process. Martin tells the couples that the houses in the neighborhood called Yonder are selling like hot cakes. The houses are tiny starter homes in what you imagine the picture perfect suburbia to look like. So Martin offers to have them follow him to the Yonder development so they can take a look at the homes. Gemma explains that the houses are not exactly what they are looking for, but that it is worth a look. They drive into the subdivision and follow Martin to one specific unit. The entire neighborhood is completely and utterly deserted. Number nine is their unit. Martin explains that the homes really are ideal. It is already furnished, albeit with ugly ass furniture. There is already a welcome basket in the fridge with strawberries and champagne. There is a nursery upstairs. Martin asks if they have children and Gemma says “No, not yet.” Martin then proceeds to repeat the same thing in the same tone back to her. Fucking weirdo.
Martin lets them into the backyard and Gemma asks when the buyers are set to move in. Martin never answers. They look for him in the house and never find him. In the front, they notice Martin’s car is gone. They get into the car to drive away and discover very quickly that no matter what route they take, they cannot get out of the neighborhood. Every route they take leads them back to house number 9. Tom makes Gemma control of the wheel and still, they cannot get out. Their cellphones have no signal at all. They continue to drive around until the sun goes down and still, they keep ending up at house nine. Eventually, they decide to stop at the house and stay the night there. Before they go inside, they call out for help and no one answers. Their house is the only one with any lights on. They drink the champagne and eat the strawberries from the welcome basket. They comment on how the strawberries have no taste at all. In bed, Gemma says she has never heard such silence before. The next morning, Tom gets his ladder out and climbs up onto the roof of the house to see if he can find a way to get out. As far as his eyes can see, it is all rows of the same exact houses. The clouds are fake. Tom panics a little and says that they are just going to walk in one direction straight and cut through yards and jump fences to follow the direction of the sun. After walking the entire day, the sun sets and they find a backyard with a light on inside the house. They go inside the house only to discover that is theirs, house number 9. They walk out the front door and find a box. When they open it, they find very intensely packaged foods and toiletry items to take care of themselves and nourish their bodies. Tom takes a piece of the box and sets it on fire with lighter and uses it to burn the house down to send out a smoke signal. They wait outside on the sidewalk across the street the entire night and wake up to a smoky atmosphere and another box. Inside of this box is a baby. The box says “Raise the child and be released”.
Gemma picks up the baby and discovers it is a boy. Oh and by the way, the house is still there. It never burned down. The door to the house opens on its own. Cut to an aerial view of the roof of the house, they have spelled out “HELP” in white. They wake up in the morning to a toddler aged boy standing at the foot of the bed. Tom and Gemma flip him off and he flips them off back. The boy then proceeds to act an entire conversation between Tom and Gemma, fluctuating his voice. He has an incredibly deep voice. He wants to be measured for his height. Gemma marks the wall day 98. So he has literally grown into like a 10 year old in less than a year. The boy wants to know what a dog is and when Gemma tells him that she already told him that, he runs around the house barking incessantly. Then, asks he Gemma is she is overwhelmed again and calls her mother. She says she is not his mother and she has no idea who his mother is. He then stops everything he is doing and screams at the top of his lungs until Gemma and Tom fill up a bowl of cereal for him. They dispose all of their trash in the boxes they get their deliveries in and wait outside for whoever brings the new boxes to arrive with a pickaxe. They are waiting for the delivery person so they can kill them. They talk about how the waiting and murder plan is pointless because they never see the person anyway, just like it is futile to put an SOS on the roof of the house when no planes ever fly over. Gemma says the boy is always watching, and Tom tells her that he is not a boy.
Tom has been savoring his cigarettes because obviously he cannot buy anymore. He flicks the butt on the grass and the grass immediately dies, exposing some sandy clay soil. So Gemma and Tom proceed to dig into the ground with Tom’s tools. While they were digging, someone came and collected the trash box and none of them noticed. Tom digs until the sun goes down and before bed, Gemma and Tom have sex while the boy watches through a crack in the bedroom door. The next morning, Tom eats breakfast quickly and goes back out to dig. The hole didn’t refill itself magically at night, so that is a good sign they are making some progress. Gemma does laundry while the boy runs around the house barking like a dog. She puts her head against the washing machine to drown out the boy’s sounds. That night, the boy turns on the TV. It is just a series of black and white lines that morph and contort while static plays in the background, but he watches it intently. Gemma waits in the car by herself until Tom notices and joins her. They talk about how the car has a smell, a real smell, because in Yonder nothing has a smell or taste. They turn the key and discover that the car battery still works and listen to the radio while dancing in the street. The boy comes outside and watches them dance for a while until he eventually joins them. The boys purposely trips Tom and he hits his head on the curb. He gets up and picks up the boy and slams him against the street. He gets back up and starts dancing.
Gemma puts him down for bed and tries to explain that they cannot be with him all the time and that people sometimes like to be alone. He doesn’t understand. He says “goodnight mother” and Gemma responds that she is not his mother. After she closes the door, he starts to scream again until she shakes him so hard he stops and proceeds to mimic Tom again, like he is channeling Tom. She tells him that he is fucking disgusting. In bed, Tom rejects Gemma’s sexual advances and they go to sleep. The next morning, the boy wakes them up by screaming and tells them that he is fucking disgusting. At breakfast, Tom eats quickly and gets back outside to keep digging. Primarily in the morning, the boy mimics every single movement that Gemma makes. Tom eventually digs so deep that he hears something screaming through the dirt. They wake up in the middle of the night to find the boy watching the tv again. They try to turn it off but he just keeps taking the remote back and turning it back on regardless of what his “parents” say. The next morning, the boy screams until Gemma makes him a bowl of cereal for breakfast. Tom has decided he has had enough so he takes the cereal bowl and throws it against the wall and takes the boy and locks him in the car. Gemma tries to get him to let the boy out, and Tom tackles her and tells her that she cannot interact with the boy or feed him or act like its mother anymore. He says that if they don’t want the boy to die, someone will come for it.
Gemma eventually takes the keys from Tom and gets the boy out of the car. Tom digs all day again until he eventually starts screaming into the ground, asking if whatever is down there can hear him. Gemma puts the boy to bed while Tom screams at the dirt and eventually falls asleep in the hole. Gemma lays down with the boy and he cuddles her and they both go to sleep. Tom wakes up in the hole. He encounters Gemma coming downstairs with the boy, hand in hand. Tom eats breakfast alone. Gemma and the boy have a picnic outside and talk about how all the clouds are shaped like clouds and bark together. Tom sleeps in the hole again. After Gemma gets ready the next morning, waking up on her own without the screaming boy, she goes to look for him around the house and cannot find him. She tells Tom the boy has gone missing and he says that so have they and offers no other help. When she comes back to the house, he is standing above the hole holding a red book.
Gemma takes the book and tries to decipher it, but it is all a series of characters and symbols and drawings and representations of the TV static that she cannot decipher. She eventually finds a page that shows an adult male, adult female, and a child. While Tom sleeps in his hole, Gemma confronts the boy while he is watching TV. He tells her he was solving a mystery in which he met someone and is not allowed to tell Gemma who it was that he met. She turns off the TV and tells him that she wants to play a game called Pretend, where the boy pretends to be things or people. He pretends to be Gemma, Tom, a dog, and the person he met today. When he pretends to be the person he met that day, he bends over and groans and forms these giant round masses on each side of his neck. Gemma is obviously horrified, and lets him know again that she is certainly not his mother and that she wants to go home. He relays to her that is already home.
Fast forward, they have put “FUK U” on the roof of the house. This boy is know a fully grown adult man. At night, Tom and Gemma put a chair under their door handle of their bedroom to keep the boy out. They even eat alone in their bedroom. Gemma regretfully asks Tom why she didn’t let him kill the boy when he was younger, and Tom lets her know that she is a good person. In the shower, Tom is so weak he cannot even wash his own body anymore. The next morning, Gemma puts on her shoes and meets the boy at the door. They play a game in which he walks around the neighborhood and she follows after him, trying to keep up and follow him to wherever he keeps going. Tom is still digging and I am wondering when his ladder will no longer be tall enough to get himself out of the hole. So everyday now while Tom is digging, Gemma is following the boy around the neighborhood. That night, Tom finally discovers a bag in the hole he has been digging. Gemma gets lost and calls out for Tom, and Tom calls back out for her until he is too weak and falls asleep on the street with his head on the curb. The boy locks all the doors of the house and watches TV. Gemma and Tom sleep in the car.
Gemma begs for the boy’s help the next morning because she cannot wake Tom up because he is so sick. The boy leaves and takes the keys to the house with him and suggests that maybe Tom be released. Gemma holds Tom all day long on the sidewalk, lighting his last few stubs of cigarettes for him, trying to keep him comfortable. Tom asks her if she remembers the wind, because in Yonder they have no wind. Tom reminds Gemma of the time that they met, when Gemma was stood up by a man and Tom approached her to ask her for a drink. They got blackout drunk together and Tom woke up on her couch and she made him scrambled eggs. Tom tells her that he felt like he was at home because of her, and even now he still feels like he is home right now. Tom then dies in her arms on the sidewalk. Gemma sleeps on Tom’s body until the boy comes home with a new box. The box has a body bag in it. the boy puts Tom is the bag, sucks all of the air out of it, and throws it into the hole Tom dug while Gemma sobs on the ground.
She sleeps in the car and the next morning, the boy goes to check and see if Tom’s body is still there. Gemma runs after the boy with a pickaxe and hits him in the head once. He picks up the sidewalk like it is rubber and crawls under it. She manages to get the pickaxe under the sidewalk to hold it up long enough for her to crawl under. Under the sidewalk is just another house with another mother with another random boy and the whole house is lit in red. The floor in the kitchen swallows Emma and she lands in a green room where a boy watches two adults have sex. Again, swallowed into the floor and lands in a blue bathroom in the shower. She pulls back a shower curtain to find a man soaking in his own blood in the bathtub. Gemma then falls down the stairs of her own house, transitioning back into her actual world above the sidewalk.
She manages to make her way out the front door and collapse on the sidewalk. The boy then gets the house ready for the next tenants and puts Gemma in a body bag, telling her that her job was to be a mother and she asks “what do mothers do?” and the boy says “they die.” She tells him that all they wanted was a home, and he explains again that they are home “mother”. She tells him that she is not his fucking mother and he zips up the body bag and throws her into the hole that Tom dug. The boy fills the hole up, puts gas in Gemma and Tom’s car, and drives away. He has now assumed the role of Martin. He drives to the real estate office to find a very very old Martin. Martin gives the boy his name tag and dies immediately. The only thing in Martin’s desk was a body bag, so the boy places Martin in it, folds him up really nicely, and places him a very large cabinet drawer. He now assumes the position as the new Martin and waits at the desk for the next clients to come in.
This movie is wild and unsettling and makes me want to scream in the best possible way. “Vivarium”, which is a word that my Texas public school brain had never heard before this movie, is defined as “an enclosure, container, or structure adapted or prepared for keeping animals under seminatural conditions for observation or study or as pets; an aquarium or terrarium.” This totally makes sense when you look at the way the houses and the grass and the sky look. Everything looks fake, but is supposed to feel real. It is a simulation. The animals in the definition are actually Tom and Gemma and the semi-natural conditions are fake clouds and no wind and no way out, it is completely enclosed.
The concept of animals relying on other animals to raise their young is called brood parasitism. This type of parasitism is common among insects, fish and birds, in which the parasite species manipulates the host (which can be of the same or of a different species) into raising its own young. This is usually done by mimicry of eggs, which is when the eggs are similar looking to the hosts actual eggs. This is part of an evolutionary strategy that I will not get into because if I think too long about evolution I will cry. There are some defense mechanisms for this type of parasitism, which include the host recognizing the parasitic egg and ejecting it from the nest, breaking it, or abandoning the next altogether and starting over with a new nest somewhere else. But more often than that, the host does care of the parasitic young and this is really hard for me and apparently all scientists because the cuckoo (for example) looks nothing like the rest of the young in the nest, but birds are stupid and we all know that. There is one theory that, because I love The Sopranos so much, I have to talk about. This is called the mafia hypothesis, and this hypothesizes that, if the host does reject the parasitic egg/young, the parasitic parent will destroy the nest of the host and kill all of the hosts’ actual young in retaliation. I think it is 90% this and 10% that Tom and Gemma fell into traditional gender roles. Gemma took care of the boy and cleaned and cooked and did laundry and Tom “worked” by digging a hole.
The ideas of a parasite are heavily prevalent throughout the film. The boy is literally draining the life out of his parents. Tom becomes more and more sick and tired and eventually dies being the host for this non-human boy. Gemma becomes more and more fearful, and continues to raise the boy out of fear. Eventually, she is so tired by the end of the movie that she willingly gets into the body bag and does not even try to fight it anymore. Much like the cuckoo at the beginning of the movie, the boy grows up really quickly and takes over the house (or nest) as his own. He even goes as far as to lock Gemma and Tom out of the house so they can no longer access it. Additionally, Gemma and Tom take the two different approaches to natural parasitism hosting. Gemma parents the child out of fear of retaliation (from what, I am not sure) and Tom takes the approach of complete rejection by not acknowledging or caring for the boy at all.
In a “This is Barry” blog, which is linked below, the author talks about how residential developments much like this one were developed during and after the 2008 financial crisis because the cost of development of identical homes is low and keeps profits maximized for the builders. They make look like nice homes, but the materials are cheap and they are not meant to be the lifetime home of the buyer. Gemma and Tom fell into this type of trap, ending up in this home that looks nice but is cheap. It just so happens for them that the cost was literally $0 because they got trapped there.
