The New Sartre

Lorcan Finnegan (director), Vivarium

A young couple looking toward adulthood have decided they’re ready to purchase a home. Gemma (Imogen Poots) teaches kindergarten, and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) is a tree surgeon; they have no last names. Curiosity brings them to an estate agent, Martin (Jonathan Aris), who lacks social skills but is persuasively pushy. Martin shows them a manicured, hastily erected suburban tract home… and leaves them there.

Writer-director Lorcan Finnegan claims he found inspiration in his native Ireland, where land developers built ugly, soulless suburbs in the middle 2000’s, then abandoned them when the market cratered in 2007. Ireland’s urban margins are full of ghost towns which have never been occupied. The houses, like in this movie’s Yonder development, are virtually identical, built on flat quarter-acre lots. The streets are impossible to navigate without GPS.

Alone in the Yonder suburb, Gemma and Tom try to leave, but can’t. Every road returns to the same house. The house is already furnished, so they reluctantly spend the night. Come morning, they find a box stuffed with enough bland, flavorless food for one day. Also the next morning, and the next. Then, one morning, they find another box. This box contains a baby, and a promise: “Raise it and be released.”

Judging by several previous reviews, this movie must divide audiences starkly. Many people complain that it’s slow-moving, atmospheric, and circular. Yet other viewers, including me, believe that’s the point. Gemma and Tom find themselves thrust into a Sartre-esque human hellscape where past and future don’t exist, yet dominate their every moment. Apparently some audiences wanted monsters, but this movie offers the greatest horror: adulthood under Late Capitalism.

The house divides people into roles. Tom, a gardener who hopes to become an entrepreneur someday, digs a hole, looking for escape, because it’s the one thing he can control. Every day he leaves the house and resumes digging, while Gemma stays inside, raising The Boy. The community forces them into preassigned roles, segregated according to gender, granting only as much freedom as the house and land permit.

Therefore Tom keeps digging, deeper and deeper, because the work is the only thing that gives his life any shape. He sees himself constantly on the brink of breaking free from the imprisonment of his future: he lives entirely for what’s going to happen around the next bend. There’s nothing in his present, including Gemma, that gives his life meaning anymore; posterity has sucked all meaning from his life.

Imogen Poots (left) and Jesse Eisenberg failing to escape the suburbs, in Vivarium

This is a movie about futility. It’s about how everything Gemma and Tom do comes to nothing: the work of digging turns into digging your own grave, and the effort of maintaining a house becomes an effort at creating something worth abandoning. (The symbolism is hushed but overt.) Everything the characters do comes to nothing, because they’re doomed to uselessness. Because, let’s be honest, that’s the dream sold to us.

We spend a child’s first eighteen years telling them their dreams can take them anywhere, and the next fifty years relentlessly demanding they wake up and earn a living. We tell adults to keep their aspirations small: the house is basically a traditional London-style two-up, two-down; the wall art is images of the house. The aspirations are limited to what we already have and what we can’t take with us.

Partway through, Gemma screams: “I want to go home.” Meaning, she wants to reclaim the dreams she had before suburban mediocrity claimed them. But she can’t: she’s indebted to the future, which already owns everything she creates. Her dreams are subordinated to somebody else’s dreams, which will eventually be subordinated to somebody else’s. The future owns her, leaving her, paradoxically, trapped in the present.

If this isn’t a movie about capitalism, it’s certainly about not controlling your choices. Gemma and Tom don’t own their effort; everything they build belongs to someone else. Late Capitalism creates the illusion that we’re working for the next generation, but we’re just going through the motions. Gemma and Tom might escape if not for The Boy, but probably not: even before, they lived entirely on promises of the future.

We’ve been conditioned to accept diminished expectations, because it’s all we’ve been shown. But, Finnegan insists, it’s a fake life. The suburban promise is a reality we didn’t choose and didn’t create. Only when Tom and Gemma physically can’t escape the ’burbs, though, does this reality become visible. Their life becomes brooding, atmospheric, and granular; but, the denouement suggests, it already was. And so, implicitly, is ours.