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[horror talk] OK I watched this movie a few weeks ago but it's stuck in my head (positive?) for a while so let's talk about Vivarium
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Vivarium Trailer #1 (2020) | Movieclips Trailers
let's all stop and watch the trailer
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Just to get the vibes and look of the movie in your heads
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so!
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Vivarium is about Tom and Jemma, a couple looking for a home
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they end up in the process finding an office advertising a new housing project called Yonder
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where a weird bland white guy explains how they have just the best perfect neighborhood at crazy low prices
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so they go check it out! it's a maze of identical green houses
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where you will find your forever home
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they tour house 9, get the whole pitch, and decide it's not for them, and leave
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but they can't find the way out
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all the streets just loop back into each other and they keep coming back to house 9
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for hours and hours
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and eventually are just like, well
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while we look for a way out, we can crash here
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so Tom and Jemma now live in Yonder
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no contact with the outside world, nobody else in the neighborhood
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the sky is always the same bizarre polka dot cloud pattern, with no wind and no other weather
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one day, a child appears
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let's roll back a bit actually
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while they can't find anyone else, they are being provided for
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a box appears every morning containing vacuum packed, tasteless food
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and one day
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the box includes a little boy
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an infant
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included with the baby is a message saying
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"Raise the child and be released."
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Skip ahead 98 days
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the infant is unaccountably ten years old now and acts like a fucking alien
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he mimics his 'parents' with uncanny accuracy, and every morning, he sits downstairs at the kitchen table and just shrieks piercingly without stopping to breathe until he has been given food
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they go back and forth a few times about killing the boy
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Tom starts digging a hole in the front lawn
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trying to see how deep the weird yellow soil goes
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shit continues to be weird
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one day the boy comes home with a book depicting humans with weird inflatable throat sacs
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when Gemma asks him to imitate the person who gave him the book, he inflates his weird giant throat sacs
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More time passes
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The Boy is now a young adult
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a weird late-teens white boy
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slightly more humanlike but still weird
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still spends his evenings watching fractal static patterns on TV for hours
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Tom finds something in his hole, like 12 feet deep
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it's a vacuum-sealed human corpse
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The Boy locks them out of the house, Tom gets suddenly ill
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Gemma begs the Boy for medicine
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the Boy says
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"Maybe it's time for him to be released"
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Tom dies
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The Boy puts his body in a vacuum sealed bag and tosses it into the hole
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and fills it back in
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Gemma takes the pickaxe Tom was using in his hole digging operation and attacks the Boy, injuring it
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the Boy hisses, then just
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pulls up the sidewalk and crawls under it like it's a blanket
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Gemma follows it into the world underneath Yonder
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(minor correction, he did not fill in the hole. he hasn't had time)
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it's a surreal hellscape of mashed-together suburban houses of different colors
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wandering through rooms occupied by other pairs of parents being forced to raise The Boys
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all in various states of self-destruction
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eventually she winds up back in house 9
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weak and dying of an unknown cause
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The Boy explains to her that mothers die when they finish raising their children
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and zips her up into a vacuum seal bag
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she dies as he does it
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The Boy throws Gemma in the hole with Tom and fills it in
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then, leaves Yonder
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to go back to the office where they heard about it
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the boring white guy who sold them on it is now old and withered
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his name was Martin
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Martin hands The Boy his nametag, then dies
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The Boy is now the next Martin
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he puts the old Martin in a vacuum bag, and disposes of him
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then takes his seat
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waiting for the next couple
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end of movie
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it's a "the end no moral" movie that actually did work for me
Niamh Vibes
moral: don't trust real estate
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it's like... it's not just having bad things happen and then the bad guys win and that's the movie
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it's depicting a surreal, nightmarish lifecycle of some unknowable organism
pastel ranma
There's a whole ecosystem of a sort here yeah
pastel ranma
Though I'm wondering what this world's answer to someone killing their assigned Boy is.
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the things that happen make no sense but in a way that feels like
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you're seeing just enough of it to see that something exists here that you don't understand
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it's not nonsense, it's a set of rules you are not privy to
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it goes "damn, isn't that shit fucking crazy?" and I go "actually yeah it really was"
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movies like Smile and Population 436 feel bad in the end because they tell a whole story about someone struggling and growing and triumphing over adversity, then go "syke! they lose. demons win. roll credits"
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and that's not a tragedy that's just dumb
owl time
Absolutely wild
ғᴏxʏᴍᴏʀᴏɴ
a lot of this setup actually made me think of like
ғᴏxʏᴍᴏʀᴏɴ
those birds that will leave their eggs in other birds' nests to like. surprise bitch you're raising my eggs now!
ғᴏxʏᴍᴏʀᴏɴ
especially with "sits at the table and screams until food"
ғᴏxʏᴍᴏʀᴏɴ
I genuinely thought for a bit at the start the twist was gonna be "this is just a nature documentary about birds but they're using humans to make it fucked up"
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that's an amazing concept for a movie though
owl time
Holy shit
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we don't learn what happens if you kill the Boy but maybe they just deliver you a new one