Tag: Lorcan Finnegan

Vivarium

Posted on by victorfraga

Lorcan Finnegan’s first widely distributed movie (he had made one previously that had a festival run), was one of the first films in the UK to have its theatrical release cancelled over the coronavirus cinema closures. It stars Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots as Tom and Gemma, a young couple who decide to look into buying their first house. They meet a very odd realtor, and drive out to see a house that he’s showing. Very quickly they notice that all the houses in the labyrinthian suburb have the same design. Halfway through the viewing, the realtor disappears, and they decide to leave – but as they try to drive away, no matter where they go, they keep ending up at the same house. They wait for the realtor but he never returns – and suddenly a baby is delivered that they have to take care of. From there, things just get stranger and stranger as it goes along.

The film reminded me a lot of Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966). Both movies have a similarly dirty and unsettling twist. It’s definitely pulling on very solid influences, from films about the suburbs like Parents (Bob Balaban, 1989) to The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998), to plenty of Twilight Zone episodes with similar concepts.

Although it was made without loads of money, it’s very well crafted, with some impressive world-building involved. There is a a real sense of the scale. All the houses are painted in this distinct shade of blue-green, and they reminded me most of the houses in Edward Scissorhands (but in this case, identical). It was shot in Belgium and Ireland, and has a very strange location feel – you can’t quite put your finger on where it is, which is deliberate and adds to the atmosphere.

It’s centred on two of the best young actors around. Eisenberg and Poots starred in The Art of Self-Defense (Riley Stearns) last year: they are a good, quirky, indie double act with some real chemistry.

Vivarium has some funny moments, although it’s not a laugh-out-loud film by any stretch. It definitely has its quirks, and goes in some very interesting directions, with a very strong ending. You see it coming to some extent, but you’ll still be impacted. It adds to the long lineage of films for those who, like me, have always found the suburbs terrifying. It gives a whole new meaning to the line from the Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime: “How did I get here? This is not my beautiful house.”

Vivarium is streaming from Friday, Match 27th on all major platforms.

Without Name

Posted on by mjbstaging

Some films are a trap. The post-modern French philosopher Gilles Deleuze broke down the cinematic experience into three varieties of images: the perception-image, the action-image, and the affection-image. These images relate respectively to the perception of sight, the interaction between characters and their positions, and to emotional experience. In Without Name the images are a hypnotic poison. The three varieties of images are presented in such a compact way that your senses are magnectically caught by the screen. There is no way out but to watch the film until the end.

It starts by introducing the land surveyor Eric (Alan McKenna). He takes a job in a plot land inside a deep and dense forest. He has to measure the land but some strange events begin to unfold. He doesn’t really know who has hired him and where exactly he is, as the site is not on any map. His personal life seems to have driven him into a dead end road: his marriage is falling apart and he has a very distant son. He is having an affair with his young assistant Olivia (Niamh Algar), an inquisitive woman who brings him more trouble than help. Everything evades Eric’s control and you feel tempted to rescue him from the void in which he is falling.

Without Name‘s narrative is a clever construction of stimuli with the purpose of giving you fear and goosebumps. Eric’s disturbed state causes commotion. His motivations are similar to the clumsy police officer Jong-goo in The Wailing – Read our review here. Eric is also trying to decode the secrets of the dark woodlands surrounding him. Just like the South Korean character, he surrenders to the environment. He finds some notes written by the former surveyor, who has mysteriously abandoned the job as well as the house where Eric and Olivia sleep. The notebook describes “The knowledge of the trees”, including a hallucinogenic mushroom that grows in that hidden forest. Soon both Eric and Olivia succumb to the drug.

The plot then becomes a little bit predictable. Eric’s fragile psyche evolves into a pitiful condition. Suddenly people disappear. He can hear plants talking. His girlfriend leaves him alone. You become anxious to anticipate how the filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan will solve this mystery. Is it a simple tale of a revengeful mother nature?

The film goes very well in the first half, when the acid-trip descends into some sort of eco-horror.

Unlike Wernor Herzog’s filmography, in which the concept of individual ambition is pitted against the forces of natural world, Without Name has a silly ending. In the fiction Fitzcarraldo (Herzog, 1982), for instance, the Herculean hero takes a Sisyphean turn, which explains Herzog’s general animosity towards those who see themselves as masters of the natural world. The same happens in the documentary Grizzly Man (Herzog, 2005), in which a man is devoured by bears because he thought he had tamed them. The human ambition versus nature is present in several of Herzog’s movies.

Finnegan, though, chooses a very different solution, with plenty of spectral lights and visual effects, thereby losing some of the film focus.

Without Name is out this weekend in the UK. It is also showing at Glasgow Film Festival on 18th and 23rd of February. For more info about the festival, click here:

Watch the film teaser trailer below: