You can buy one of Vivarium’s homes, but can you leave? Vertigo Films
Film
Lorcan Finnegan
XYZ Films
THE unnerving strangeness of Vivarium is apparent from the off. In the first 5 minutes, a young child leaving pre-school finds two baby birds lying dead at the foot of a tree, wrestled out of their nest by a cuckoo hatchling.
Schoolteacher Jemma hunkers down by the girl to offer some comfort. “That’s nature,” she says. “That’s just the way things are.”
The girl isn’t buying this. “I don’t like the way things are,” she says. “It’s horrible.”
How right…
