Vivarium

Society's leaders, whoever they may be, have laid before you an established, very well walked - or crawled - path, and they would recommend you to take it (there's surprisingly little in way of alternative options anyway): grow up whilst acquiring an education (i.e. the world is the way we are telling you it is), leave school and get even more educated, find a partner, find a job, find a house, settle into it, produce offspring, die.  There are a few extras, such as discover new ways to despise your fellow human beings (a neat little distraction and focal point for your energy) and assimilate as much as the media can feed you.  The point of all this is unclear; perhaps there was a point to your existence but it has been lost in the shaping of your essentially predetermined life by others who remain unknown to you.

If I may be as bold, I will make a recommendation contrary to the above: do not, if at all possible, follow the established path.  Particularly if you are male.  If you do find a partner, no matter how perfect she may be, do not if you can avoid it cohabitate, especially do not get married, and if nothing else: never, ever, EVER impregnate someone.  Your life will be over, even if you don't realise it at that point, and you will have satisfied the purpose laid down before you by those unknown others.  Tricked into a marital existence where your finances and freedom will be forever compromised while you are drained very gradually of your soul.  And once you have produced the offspring so begged of you, so acclaimed as normal behaviour, anything that was ever unique about you or your potential will be eliminated over time, and that offspring will replace you.  You will become redundant, and figuratively or literally - it really won't matter to the world - dead.  Your leaders won't have to dig your grave for you, you will voluntarily do it yourself.

This paragraph doesn't contain spoilers as such, but Vivarium is best viewed to my mind without knowing too much about it.  A young couple are perusing the housing market for their new nest, the perfect place to conventionally exist and bring up the child that does not yet exist in their lives.  They discover an estate agent selling homes on what appears to be a newly rooted development, some drive away.  A strange man to be selling property, the couple reluctantly drive along with him to take a cursory look at the place, more out of politeness or persuasion than any real volition.  Once in the bland estate, devoid of people, where all of the new houses look pretty much alike, they wander around the intended sale without too much of a spark going off.  Then the estate agent departs without warning.  They decide to do the same, realising it to be perplexingly impossible to find their way back out of the estate.  Eventually their car runs out of fuel right outside the very house they didn't want in the first place, so they're forced to stay the night.  The next day, or days, they desperately try to get out of the town but cannot locate the exit, nor any other people.  Eventually they resign to accepting they are trapped.  At which point a child is delivered to them, the promise of freedom written in the box should they manage to raise the child.  At this point their troubles really fire up.

Taking a blend of horror and science fiction as its genre base, 2019's Vivarium (directed by Lorcan Finnegan) is really a grim social satire which I see as a commentary on the life you are quite likely to lead, a story that - if you see through its metaphors - is also likely to scare the bejesus out of you.  The bland estate and its identical houses, a place full of nobody, a 'job' of sorts that Tom goes to each day that is largely fruitless and ultimately self-destructive, deteriorating relationships, and a child that is frankly one of the scariest children ever put on screen.  If you were half considering children before watching this film, you will - wisely in my opinion - decide against it afterwards!  All of this is delivered with a heavy dose of surrealism and no attempt to pretend that the world Tom and Gemma find themselves is remotely real.  Sort of like your own world really.  If you want conventional narrative - that thing that you think applies to your life - you've come to the wrong place with this film.

I think the project itself could have taken a stronger path but the ideas themselves combined with the enslaved plight of the ordinary couple grab your interest and really keep it ensnared throughout the running time.  If I had to pick issues it would primarily be in Jesse Eisenberg, who I think is miscast and not capable of delivering the raw emotional disintegration that would have made his character's hell much more poignant.  British-born Imogen Poots (you might recognise her from 28 Weeks Later) as Gemma does a better job of displaying her suffering.  And whoever that kid is, well, I never want to run into him in my nightmares!  The other approach I would have taken is to grant the world slightly more verisimilitude, but not completely.  I get that the filmmakers wanted this to look unreal, I personally think it would have hit the mark harder if it resembled what appears to be reality just a little more closely (i.e. as it is, many people might simply see this as a surreal science fiction rather than a distorted mirror designed, possibly, to aid awakening).  Still, they are minor gripes and overall this Danish sourced production is a very impactful one, and one that kept me thinking for days afterwards.  There's not too much in modern cinema that manages that.

In terms of purchasing, annoyingly the British distributors have chosen to put this out of DVD only at time of writing.  I would suggest not supporting such decisions and go for an overseas Blu-ray, either from the US or if you want a reasonably priced option, Germany.  The film did play on Film 4 recently, which is of course a convenient way to check it out first.