Vivarium review – home is where the hell is

Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots are plunged into a suburban nightmare in this unsettling satire on consumerismIn one of the creepiest episodes of the vintage American TV series The Twilight Zone, residents of the apparently idyllic Peaksville find themselves cut off from the rest of the world, terrorised by the petulant yet godlike mind of a small child.

Adapted from a story by Jerome Bixby, the episode (ironically entitled It’s a Good Life) struck a chilling chord with audiences in 1961, watching from behind their picket fences, mesmerised by its darkly comic vision of a world in which failing to think happy thoughts was punishable by death, or worse.You can see a trace of It’s a Good Life (which has continued to resonate through popular culture) in Vivarium, the second feature from director Lorcan Finnegan and writer Garret Shanley, a paranoid fable in which the aspiration of acquiring a

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