Metacritic reviews

While I already miss the experience of seeing these films in a theatre, Vivarium does evoke TV precedents, most notably Twilight Zone in the cleanness of its premise and the parsing out of dark details on a need-to-know basis.

I have to give the filmmakers a ton of credit here because they walk themselves to a point of no return as far as where things are heading and they do not blink. They lift the curtain to briefly show us the horrors beneath the sterile walls of this prison and let them exist as inevitability rather than something that can be altered.

Vivarium is a lab-rat experiment of a film, with flat, facetious humour and a single insidious joke maintained and developed with monomaniacal intensity. In its way, this film is an emblem of postnatal depression and simple loneliness.

It’s open to debate whether this claustrophobic little parable means something. It’s devilishly clever but there’s a suspicion that this is beautiful calligraphy without words. And yet with the added circumstance of self-isolation, quarantine and quiet four-walled despair, Vivarium will undoubtedly resonate.

Vivarium is a wonderfully strange and gripping thriller that examines the stresses of homeownership and starting a family, perhaps all-too-soon.

There’s a consistent inventiveness — and grim humor — to this treatment of a seemingly well-worn theme.

Vivarium is an exercise in wringing dry the audience’s emotions until we’re nothing but husks. For some, that could be appreciatively cathartic right about now. Myself, I felt little other than a deep and nagging depression.

If you can look past the gallingly obvious and derivative metaphor, Vivarium has its moments of effective "Twilight Zone" creepiness.

This a parable about adulthood boasts deeply cynical takes on home, community, and childrearing.

Finnegan offers a vision of domesticity as a soul-sucking grind, done for the benefit of malevolent overlords. His film chills the mind more than the spine.