10 Slow Burn Horror Movies With An Underwhelming Pay Off

Starring Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg, Vivarium sees young couple Gemma (Poots) and Tom (Eisenberg) search for their dream home together. Their search takes them to Yonder, a picturesque suburb where everything looks the same. But when they become trapped and forced to raise a child that’s anything but human, their dream of starting a family descends into an inescapable nightmare.

What follows is a suburban dystopia that plays out like an episode of Black Mirror. The child demonstrates increasingly strange behaviour, and the couple soon find themselves detesting each other and the child.

While Vivarium’s allegories are anything but subtle, it nevertheless presents its ideas within a captivating mystery that only grows more enticing as events progress. Viewers will be spending their time waiting for some sort of explanation for what’s happening. However, nothing of the sort arrives. All we can derive is the couple are somehow being held prisoner in an impossible space by an unknown alien race.

Though there’s nothing wrong with ambiguity, Vivarium’s plot revolves around the couple’s search for answers. And when all we get is a nihilistic allegory of family life, the payoff is devoid of any deeper meaning beyond its obvious metaphors.