The situation with new films is slow to resolve, and studios regularly postpone premieres until fall and winter, so there's nothing left but to revisit classics, or to make a second run at special films in which finding new details is a special treat. The hermetic sci-fi horror "Vivarium" by Irish screenwriter-director Lorcan Finnegan, released in 2019, can be considered just such, and not only markedly ahead of its time in its emphasis on the horrors of social isolation, it also played brilliantly in the once popular "alien abduction narrative" genre.

Spent Sunday evening watching it, and I'm happy to share my renewed impressions.

A young teacher (Imogen Poots) and her handyman boyfriend (Jesse Eisenberg) decide to look for a place to live and end up at a rather strange real estate agency.

The guys agree to look at a house in a new suburban neighborhood, but when they see a "toy neighborhood" they decide to back out of the deal. But the realtor disappears without a trace, and get out of this maze of identical houses is almost impossible.

In addition to all the strangeness, a box with a baby appears on their doorstep with a note "Raise the baby - get your freedom".

Inspired by the paintings of the Surrealist painter René Magritte and the documentary series "BBC: The film makes a strong impression and, without a doubt, one of its main pluses is that instead of the traditional personified embodiment of evil (a maniacal zombie vampire or, at worst, an alien who prefers a diet of human flesh) the filmmaker has emphasized the nightmare of routine and role models, making the audience an observer of a strange experiment.

An experiment in every sense of the word. Even the title of the film refers to the vivarium - a special room where the experimental animals are kept. And it looks as frightening as the best episodes of "Black Mirror" or "The Twilight Zone" among other things stuffed with allegories, metaphors and social satire. And the most brutal and the most cynical.

For many young parents after the birth of a child, the outside world really "ceases to exist," and not everyone goes through this period quite painlessly. For example, Eiseberg's hero looks for reasons to escape "to work" and diligently digs a hole, and the once cheerful and carefree teacher, obeying her maternal instinct and protecting the "baby-cuckoo," sinks into a gloomy paranoia.

The conflict of generations adds fuel to this fire, and the boy growing up beyond his years, binge-watching TV with strange patterns, perfectly demonstrates the hobbies of young people completely incomprehensible to their parents.

You'd think at one point Finnegan was an ardent supporter of the childefree, but in the final third he expertly shifts the emphasis to psychedelic sci-fi, with a hint that all the action is alien, and "Vivarium" is an arcane but still horror-attraction whose main purpose is to entertain and evoke emotion, and poor Poots literally drags the film on to the end. The painful transformation of her character is played just unparalleled, and going through this journey with her seems to me to be quite an interesting film experience.

I wouldn't recommend it to the most sensitive viewers (there's enough blackness and horror as it is and the previous spring-summer in lockdown hasn't weathered yet), but this is a strong and damn strange film which will take you on emotional swings, ask a lot of uncomfortable questions and leave a very long aftertaste for an hour or so.

8 out of 10

P.S. English is not my native language, so sorry for possible errors