Vivarium-- My take on the movie with spoilers!

PLOT SUMMARY: Gemma and Tom are searching for their forever home and end up being trapped in a community of identical houses. 

Did you know cuckoos don’t make their own nest? They go in search of other bird nests and when they find one unattended by the mother, they drop an egg or so and replace it with their own.

The cuckoos that hatch out aren’t so great either. Their instinct is to push down the other baby birds.

Cuckoos seem like such ungrateful jerks, don’t they?

Well, they aren’t the only ones. Apparently, aliens do that as well.

VIVARIUM Movie Plot 

Vivarium begins with a lesson on cuckoos which is an integral part of the story. Gemma is a kindergarten teacher amusing kids by pretending to be trees in the wind. Her boyfriend Tom is a gardener at the school. When they find a dead baby bird in the ground, Tom gives it a funeral and puts it in a hole.

This whole scene is created to mimic the upcoming events in the story.

Gemma and Tom are on the lookout for a good house and approach a realtor whose display houses are all green, and not even the good kind of green shade. But Gemma and Tom enter the office to meet Martin who has a perfect smile and manners. The couple doesn’t even ask to see if Martin is selling houses that are not green. Or is it because these houses are going on a good deal?

No idea.

Gemma wants to see the houses at all costs and offers to follow Martin to the community known as Yonder. They are supposed to be visiting their forever home, not a starter house as Martin explains when he shows them a nursery for a baby boy.

Martin is a gracious guide as he even offers the couple champagne and strawberries. Honestly, they should have tasted it right then, figured out it was tasteless and asked Martin to accompany them back home.

But they don’t and later when Martin disappears with his car, the couple is left with tasteless food that makes them miserable.

Gemma and Tom drive around for hours to search for an exit but keep ending up at house number 9. Eventually, they run out of gas and go inside. Luckily they have nightwear but must spend the day wearing their old clothes for months.

The couple tries every which way to look for an escape, even going up on the roof, and even jumping over fences the whole day only to end up at house number 9 at night.

They find a box filled with food upon their return, but Tom isn’t having it and uses the box to burn down the house.

They fall asleep watching the house burn and wake up in the morning to find another box with a baby inside. Raise it and be released, the instructions say. The smoke disappears and they find the house intact.

A few months pass and the boy has grown rapidly into a teenager. They have become a weird family where they greet each other in the morning with the middle finger. The boy screeches to be fed and is obsessed with checking his height.

Tom hates the boy and one day, when he’s flicking a cigarette off the boy’s chest, finds that the grass has moved a bit and there’s some weird muck underneath.

Now Tom has become rather sick of his living conditions, considering the boy spies on him when he’s being intimate with Gemma, or that he was knocked over when he was dancing with Gemma. So he prefers digging a hole and spending the whole day there rather than with the annoying boy who has begun to watch weird designs on the TV.

Gemma, on the other hand, knows Tom and her are growing apart. They no longer smile at each other while brushing their teeth and Tom doesn’t care if she’s the first one to spit.

Tom decides to lock the boy in the car and thinks that if they leave him there to die, someone would come to protect him. But Gemma is too kindhearted to do something that means spirited. She rescues the boy and Tom develops a grudge against her. He digs his hole earnestly, getting sick because of the dust, but not caring. He even begins to fall asleep there, getting obsessed with the hole that is to be his means to an escape.

One day the boy disappears and Gemma tries to look for him everywhere but can’t. Tom doesn’t care about anything but the hole. At night, the boy returns with a red book with strange diagrams that depict that a boy must be raised by a couple.

Gemma asks the boy to mimic her and Tom and a dog as well.

Then slyly asks him to mimic the person he met during the day. The boy’s throat swells up on both sides as he speaks in a weird tone. Gemma realizes she’s taking care of some sort of alien and freaks out.

VIVARIUM Ending Explained with Spoilers! 

More time passes and the couple no longer asks for help from passing places by putting up a message on the roof. Now they understand the predicament they are in as the boy has grown up and is meaner. He keeps calling Gemma his mother and she keeps reminding him she’s not.

Tom has dug a very deep hole but has become sicker. Gemma tried unsuccessfully to follow the boy but he tricks her every time. She laments not letting Tom kill the boy when he was younger to which Tom replies that it was because she was a nice person.

Tom is too sick and weak now and needs help to take a shower. Eventually, he collapses outside and when Gemma asks the boy to let them in and call for help, the boy returns to watching his favorite show on TV which is nothing but squiggly black and white lines.

Tom dies and the boy emerges with a body bag. He places Tom inside it and dumps him in the hole that was Tom’s grave all along.

Gemma is grief-stricken but decides she would try to kill the boy with a pickaxe. She follows him and swings the pickaxe at the boy who is hit and immediately behaves like a weird creature.

He lifts the sidewalk up and slips inside. Gemma uses the pickaxe to hold the opening up and follow him. She is hit by different lights and finds herself in different worlds where there are more people in the same predicament as her, raising boys they don’t want to.

She comes out and collapses. The boy finds her and informs her that her work is done and she must now die. Gemma’s last words are that she isn’t his mother. She’s unceremoniously dumped into the hole with Tom. The boy replaces all the soil Tom had dug out and taps with the shovel. Instantly, grass grows over it again.

The boy gets in the car and drives out to the realtor's office where Martin is heaving. He’s old and can barely sit up straight.

The boy removes a body bag from a drawer, removes the name tag and puts it on himself, then wraps and rolls the old Martin’s body in the bag and stuffs it in another drawer.

The boy is now ready to sell more weird houses to couples who like the color green.

So basically, the movie is about aliens who like to behave like cuckoos. They have devised this whole plan just so that they can have a human couple raise them so that they are prepared to go to the outside world.

And do what? Sell houses with a creepy smile? Then just sit in the office until they die and are replaced with a younger version. Where are these babies even coming from?

And what happens when the real estate market crashes and no one wants to buy a house anymore? Will the alien have to sit in the office and perish? Someone is giving birth to these babies. Will they stop until the economy bounces back? Or will there be dozens of babies living in boxes?

This whole alien race is certainly cuckoo.

Scare scale: 2.5/5