A young couple is trapped in the forever home from hell in Vivarium trailer, Ars Technica

There’s only the vaguest official premise: “A young couple looking for the perfect home find themselves trapped in a mysterious labyrinth-like neighborhood of identical houses. ” But Wikipedia offers this telling definition of the film’s title: “A vivarium is an area, usually enclosed, for keeping and raising animals or plants for observation or research.” It translates into “place of life,” and it can be a small terrarium, for example, or something much larger, like Biosphere 2. It’s pretty obvious that the film’s suburban paradise is meant to be just such a place.

Imogen Poots plays Gemma, who is married to Tom (Jesse Eisenberg). They decide to check out the home options in a wholesome development called Yonder (“It has all you’d need and all you’d want”), and a very creepy real estate agent named Martin (Jonathan Aris) shows them around # 9 . Yonder is basically a large grid of identical streets filled with identical cookie-cutter houses, with the same cookie-cutter backyards. It calls to mind the classic folk song, ” Little Boxes , “popularized by Pete Seeger in the s, about cheap, tiny suburban houses “made of ticky-tacky” that “all look just the same .

Martin seems especially keen to show them the nursery, inquiring about their plans for children.