Vivarium is the 2019 science-fiction psychological horror directed by Lorcan Finnegan, from a screenplay by Garret Shanley, starring Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg. The setup is pure Twilight Zone: a young couple house-hunting are lured by an unnervingly strange real estate agent into a brand-new development called Yonder — a grid of perfectly identical pastel-green houses. The agent vanishes, and the couple quickly discover they cannot leave; every road loops back to house number 9. Then a box arrives containing a baby, with a simple instruction: raise the child, and you'll be released. What follows is a slow descent into domestic nightmare. I genuinely struggled to know what to make of this one, and I've sat with it for a while.Let me lead with the praise, because it's substantial and entirely earned. Visually, Vivarium is stunning. The production design and cinematography create a surreal, uncanny world — the frozen painted sky, the sterile symmetry, the endless rows of indistinguishable homes — that is genuinely fascinating to look at and quietly horrifying in its perfection. The sound work is equally strong, lending the entire film a specific, dread-soaked tone that lingers. And Imogen Poots is fantastic, anchoring the whole thing with a committed, layered performance that sells the slow erosion of her character's sanity and empathy. She is, without question, the best part of the film.And then there's everything else, which simply did not work for me.I'll be transparent about my own biases here, because they're directly relevant. I have a particular disdain for three specific things: children, loud noises, and annoying sounds. Vivarium manages to weaponise all three simultaneously, in the form of the alien child the couple are forced to raise. The boy grows at an unnatural rate, shrieks relentlessly until he's fed, and mimics the couple's voices in a warped, grating way that became genuinely difficult to sit through. For long stretches of the runtime, the film is built around exactly the kind of sensory experience I find most unbearable. That's partly a me problem, but it's also a film leaning hard into deliberately abrasive territory, and it lost me there.The ending, meanwhile, is something. A bad something, in my view, but undeniably something. Without softening it: Tom dies from the toll of endlessly digging his escape, Gemma is killed and disposed of, and the boy simply returns to the real estate office to replace the now-deceased agent — revealing the whole horrifying cuckoo-like cycle is destined to repeat with the next unsuspecting couple. As a thematic statement on conformity, domesticity, and the soul-crushing treadmill of a prescribed life, I understand what it's reaching for. As an experience, it left me cold rather than disturbed in the way it intends.So my score reflects exactly that split. The points I'm awarding go entirely to the visual and sound teams, who delivered genuinely excellent work, and to Poots for holding it together. Everything built around them simply wasn't for me.