Vivarium (2019)

Gemma (Imogen Poots) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) are a young couple thinking of getting a place together. They try a new housing development, one of those horrid places where every home looks identical. All perfectly spaced, all neat boring lawns in front of neat, boring houses. Perfectly shaped clouds spaced apart overhead. It's not for them, but they find they can't escape. The agent who brought them vanishes, and all roads - even through the backyards - lead to the house he showed them.

It's then the baby shows up. In a box, no less. The baby grows, over some indeterminate amount of time, into an extremely creepy child who watches them constantly, perfectly imitates their speech and mannerisms seemingly on a whim, and shrieks like a banshee when it's hungry.

If you are a person like me, who thinks the notion of raising a child would be akin to hell, this movie isn't going to shake you of said notion.

Gemma and Tom cope in their own ways. They drift apart, then closer together, then apart again. They find little pleasures in the fact that their car - long out of gas - still has a real smell, as opposed to whatever this place they're trapped in smells like. Tom begins trying to dig his way out - which kept reminding me of the The Simpsons, "dig up, stupid!" - and this kicks off one of those stretches where he distances himself.

As Tom digs himself a hole, day after day, Gemma finds herself trying to form a connection with the odd child, who they apparently never named. But every time it seems as though she might be growing fond of him, the child does something that reminds her it is not hers, not even remotely. Then she shifts to trying to follow the child, learn where it goes, if there's a way out, who is behind this. The movie focuses on her face a lot. The dark shadows under her eyes, the sallow, greasy skin, but also the way she occasionally looks at the child with fondness, swiftly replaced with horror or revulsion.

The movie is very upfront about where it's going, since it opens by showing us what goes on when a cuckoo lays its egg (in another bird's nest, because cuckoos, like brown-headed cowbirds, are nest parasitizers). The bird whose nest was parasitized continues to feed its bizarre, overlarge offspring, presumably because it doesn't know better. You'd think this wouldn't work on humans, but we have a horrible little thing called empathy. Just not right, to light a baby on fire, or so the thinking goes.

I had wondered if the point was that, as the child imitates them, things might have gone different if they could have shown it more compassion, more understanding. That looking after others is not a burden. It does feel like a metaphor for a larger experience. The man working himself to the bone on some pointless job, slowly killing himself but telling himself it'll be worth it. The woman trying to look after a child she can't understand, who can't make its needs known, but absorbs everything the parents show it.

I don't think so, though. If it's a cuckoo, then it was never going to give a shit about its unwitting adoptive parents, no matter what they did. But maybe that's the point, that people have hope, and will keep at something long after there's any hope of a positive outcome, for lack of a better option or being unwilling to consider other options.