I probably should have used a film tag a long time ago. We talk a lot about what they, what they mean, how they subvert your thought processes, how they can be used as weapons against you, and how to subvert their subversion. Today we’re turning our baleful gaze on one of the most prescient and misunderstood movies ever, Vivarium.
Released in 2019, this is a horror movie that served as a warning to the western world about what the powers that be were about to do to them. A young couple goes to look at a house in the burbs and winds up trapped in an alien dimension, forced to raise an alien child.
Normal film buffs can only interpret this movie as an exploration of the horrors of suburbia (it’s so boring and everyone is the same) and parenthood (you have to give up who you are. It is, in a way, but it’s not exploring those themes so much as it is asking you to reject the American dream of a nice, clean, quiet house in a safe neighborhood and the hopes of ever having children of your own. Look how awful this is, the movie screams as it attempt to get you to reject even the simplest hopes for your future. Look how isolating and dreary and unrewarding being normal is!
What an awful thing to suggest. I like being normal. It’s nice, and it’s a life filled with nice people doing nice things. It’s predictable and productive and safe and billions of people over the course of history could only dream of a normal life as nice as our middle-middle class. Why, it’s so comfy and desirable that the people who hate us needed to spent trillions trying to convince us to abandon this way of life.
Anywayz the film is really more of a threat than an exploration. Within 18 months of release, the powers that be did to us all what the aliens did to that poor young couple. They locked us in our homes for months, made socializing illegal, and convinced our dearest loved ones to reject those of us who refused to comply with their evil fakery. Vivarium isn’t about the horrors of isolation in suburbia, it’s about the horrors of strange and alien powers locking you away from the warmth and companionship of being part of a healthy community.
And then there is the alien. This film would play well in any Warhammer 40K cinehouse, with it’s core message of suffer not the alien to live. Most reviewers think the film is about the misery of being a parent, but they miss the key plot point and hamfisted pre-credit sequence and even more ham fisted explanation vocalized in the first five minutes of the film. Life is cruel, and sometimes people get tricked into sacrificing themselves for strange and weird creatures that only superficially care about them while they can be of use, and your only reward for tolerance is betrayal and death.
The film was released in 2019. This picture is from 2021.
This is not an accident.
Most reviewers see the alien child as a metaphor for having your own child despite the plain test reading of the film.
That’s not their child. It doesn’t communicate the way they do, it doesn’t think the way they do, and it doesn’t feel the way they do. It doesn’t care for them, and it drains them of everything they have while offering nothing in return. It will not love them back, it will not care for them in their own later years, and it will not give them the gift of grandchildren. That thing is not their child. It is a parasite that steals from them their hopes of ever having children of their own. The film tells you this repeatedly, and the film tells you that one day you will accept that these are not your children, even as it promises you will accept that only when it is too late.
The deliberate decision NOT to cast a mixed race couple is telling, here.
The ending of the movie hammers home the threat. The powers that put the young couple into their prison desperately need you to swallow a a whole lot of lies about what the world is and how it works. They need you to think that the forces stripping you of your dreams cannot be seen nor fought. Just do your duty to their agenda and their parasitic spawn and you are promised a brief life of bland certainty before death. But the people who made this movie – not the director who from interviews is as much a dupe as his intended audience, but the quiet partners behind the green curtain – have names and addresses. They bleed, the same as you and me. And they don’t have nearly as much power as they think. They are stupid enough to think that they can win a war against God and His natural law.
People aren’t birds. Eventually, they realize what is being done to them and fight back, and the people who made this movie live in horror movie protagonist levels of dread because they know that day is inevitable. They make movies like this specifically to confuse and confound in the hopes you will not accept, “I’m not your mother!” until it is too late. Looking at the state of things as we reach the fourth quarter of the God-Emperor’s reign, it looks more and more like the film only bought them a little more time, but failed to fully extinguish the fires of Christendom. Good things are happening despite their best efforts.
Inadvertently, the film shows us the way to escape from its sickly, sterile death:
Nature is cruel, and it always wins, and we are not birds.