Describing weird fiction, writers Ann and Jeff VanderMeer muse that “with unease and temporary abolition of the rational, can come the strangely beautiful, intertwined with terror.”1 The weird tale, in all of its conceptual murkiness and eerie liminality, braids together Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan’s body of work. Finnegan’s films—made in close collaboration with screenwriter Garrett Shanley—build visually distinct, unsettling worlds. These films push weirdness beyond Lovecraftian motifs and conventions, inviting audiences to consider the precarity of human life on the planet, a precarity expedited by tilted sociopolitical systems.
In the short Foxes (2012) these ideas were channeled through a narrative in which a couple living in an isolated housing estate in Ireland are beckoned by a feral skulk of foxes to join their unruly natural surroundings. Finnegan’s first feature, Without Name (2016), depicted the mysterious pushback of a forest against a land surveyor mapping it for corporate developers. A film that darkly descends into a captivating, psychedelic swirl of ecological matter, Without Name swallows its viewers through searing images of the sublime.
Contrastingly, it is an artificial and plastic sublime that stokes horror in Finnegan and Shanley’s most recent feature, Vivarium, which premiered at the Critics Week in Cannes. In Vivarium, a young, house hunting couple Gemma (Imogen Poots) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) find themselves trapped in a surreal suburban housing complex called Yonder, a labyrinth of identical virescent homes backdropped by a blazing synthetic sun and uncannily perfect clouds. Unable to find the odd estate agent named Martin who lured them into this place, Gemma and Tom suddenly find a box with a baby inside. The only instructions: “raise the child and be released.” Vivarium, through a series of increasingly absurd nooks and crannies, introduces the idea of release only to chip away it the possibility of it. Our optimism for Gemma and Tom’s eventual freedom quickly turns into a mounting dread and morbid curiosity. It’s a complex, absurd, and visually enthralling film about the possibilities of life under late capitalism; one that hopefully activates our imagination of better worlds.
We spoke with Finnegan about events that the film specifically responds to, the director’s relationship with paintings, creepy children in horror, and how this latest project fits in with past and future work.
NOTEBOOK: I’ve been thinking a lot about recent films that use a pastel palette for dystopian subject matter. Vivarium’s color scheme reminds me of The Stepford Wives but also more recent examples, like Black Mirror’s “Nosedive.” Can you talk a little bit about the film’s palette?
LORCAN FINNEGAN: Part of the aesthetic was because of a description in the script, and part of it was color theory. The place, Yonder, was described in the script as looking like Magritte’s painting Empire of Light;so, that says a lot about the surreal nature of the place: no wind, no rain, fluffy white clouds and this kind of artificial light. But then also while developing the aesthetic for the film, I was reading a lot about color theory. The green is a really interesting color. Actually, The Wizard of Oz is an interesting reference point for this, with all that witchy green: the toxic, evil poisonous color.
Green, in nature, reflects this sort of verdant atmosphere, a freedom. Taken out of nature, with the hue shifted a little bit more towards the blue, it takes on this other color which is actually anxiety inducing. People—if they’re in a room [with that color] for a long time—start feeling oppressed. So I did a lot of experiments. We did a 3D test, in prep, of a camera just moving through this environment. That’s where we were able to tweak the color of the houses, test the sky and stuff. We landed on that color quite early on. The aesthetic reflects the film’s themes, being sold—through the social contract—an idealized version of life that is artificial, really, in its notions. So I wanted the place to have a tangible yet artificial aesthetic: real but fake; storybook looking.
NOTEBOOK: It’s interesting you mention The Wizard of Oz, because now all that fake green is reminding me of the Emerald City and how looking at those backdrops today, the trompe l’oeil appears glaringly painterly.
FINNEGAN: The clay that Tom is digging [in Vivarium] is yellow, like the yellow brick road. The design of the houses was supposed to be like if a child had drawn a house: very much like a square with the windows, doors, your man, your woman, child. I also think there’s something quite creepy about chirpiness of corporate design, where it’s presented as being nice, and bright—these pastels—but in fact it’s quite insidious. It’s hard to actually get out of it.
NOTEBOOK: The use of a relentless, sunny chirpiness to represent this hollow, enclosed world is also reminiscent of The Truman Show, especially in the design of the sky. In Vivarium, though, the characters are aware from the beginning that they’ve been trapped in a stage set emulating real life. This stagey-ness produces a very different feel from Foxes, where you use a lot of real nature to explore this concept. How did Vivarium develop out of Foxes?
FINNEGAN: Foxes was based on a short story that Garrett Shanley wrote on his blog. The short [film] was a reaction to what was going on in Ireland socio-politically. During the boom (the Celtic Tiger) the Irish economy was doing really well. A lot of builders and contractors had built all of these massive housing developments all over the country, in the middle of nowhere, which were very much like Yonder. The design of Yonder is actually based on a real place. They were building all these places and getting massive grants from the E.U., banks were offering young people 100% mortgages, and a lot of people got duped into buying these houses. Around 2008, the crash came along, and a lot of these places were almost finished or just finished and nobody could buy them; or people had just bought them. Something called “ghost estates” became kind of a phenomenon in Ireland: these massive housing developments with nobody, or just like two or three people living in a place that had a hundred houses. So the story of Foxes was set in one of these places. One of the builders gave me their keys to sort of check it out. I did a lot of scouting and a lot of research. Even in making the film learnt a lot about what was going on socially: the loss of community, the atomization of society. It was all quite a weird time.
NOTEBOOK: Where was Foxes shot?
FINNEGAN: Carlow. Leitrim had a lot of these places as well. During the process of making Foxes, which is a much more supernatural film about nature reclaiming these spaces, that was what was really happening. Trees started growing up through the road; buildings started collapsing. In the short film, she was trying to find escape in rejoining nature. While making Foxes we were just starting to touch on those themes, but we wanted to explore them properly, in a much more universal and philosophical sense with Vivarium. It was more like: what would happen if this place went on forever? More like a weird quantum trap.
NOTEBOOK: I’m curious about that. Vivarium is less site-specifically Irish than your previous work. Location signifiers are totally absent, and you’re also working with a British actor and American actor, which furthers geographic indeterminacy. Are ideas about Ireland or Irishness tucked into this film nonetheless?
FINNEGAN: I mean, obviously in the sense that Garrett wrote it and I directed it! I think there’s a fairy element to it, in a way: people disappearing with the fairies, you know? Time is less consistent with those fairy stories. Someone could go for a walk in the woods, come back out, ten years have gone by and they thought it was only five minutes. We played a little bit on that in Without Name, too. The dark sense of humor in the film is also quite Irish. Foxes and Without Name were very much about nature, and Ireland is a changing landscape. It used to be full of these amazing forests and nature abounded, but now places are getting chopped down and bulldozed over to build strip malls. With Vivarium we wanted to make a place completely without nature. It’s like: what would happen if these kind of places were built everywhere? You see the homogenization of culture in society everywhere now. So we were taking those ideas and amplifying them up, to create Yonder where everything looks exactly the same and there’s nothing natural at all. [It’s as if] humanity kept going in the direction its going, this is what it would end up looking like. Could people live in a world like that? I’d argue that they probably couldn’t.
NOTEBOOK: In Without Name, environmental themes are quite frontal, but they’re much subtler in Vivarium.
FINNEGAN: Some people think Without Name and Vivarium seem very different but, to me, they seem similar-ish. One’s got a lot of nature; the other has zero nature, but they’re saying the same thing in a weird way. The birds at the beginning of Vivarium [came from] watching this David Attenborough documentary on the life cycle of the cuckoo, which was one of the inspirations for the story. I remember, at the start, Garrett and I were thinking about what it is that young people are really frightened of. Is it monsters or is it more this existential dread? You’re full of hopes and dreams when you’re young, then you could make a few wrong choices and end up in a place like Yonder where life has just become a routine, you work all the time just to pay back a mortgage, and what’s the point of it all? We found that quite interesting and frightening, at the same time as this complete absence of the natural world in a place. When I saw that doc, I remember sending it to Garrett and we were talking about a monster that could represent the things we were talking about in this film. Something similar to the cuckoo: this parasitic monster—and that’s where Martin the estate agent came from.
NOTEBOOK: Across your films, your characters are so lonely—they’re misunderstanding one another or stuck in their own trips. What makes Vivarium different is its insistence on connection. There are all of these small, tender moments between Gemma and Tom: subversive moments of humanity in a place where humanity is totally eradicated. Why is connection important to this film?
FINNEGAN: It’s very important to feel for them. The message isn’t “life is shit.” The message is you should love each other and enjoy it, and don’t end up in somewhere like Yonder. Yonder doesn’t really understand what humanity is. They’re just giving people what it appears they want, which is much like the market, really.
I think they had to be very “normal, nice people,” who end up having to deal with the situation of being tricked into living in this place. It wouldn’t have really worked if they deserved it. We went through a few different drafts of the scripts with different people. I think we started out with extreme characters and it just felt like they needed to be people who had hopes and dreams, and were quite funny, and loved each other. So you could see how a place like Yonder would tear them apart.
NOTEBOOK: Extreme in what sense?
FINNEGAN: I think in one the guy was married, divorced, and had a young kid he was supposed to get back to. The woman was a punk or something and they were having an affair. He was a property developer. Some awful stuff like that.
NOTEBOOK: I mean, I would want to see that too!
FINNEGAN: We had a setting for the story and then it was like dropping different people in to see how they’d react. And we quickly got rid of that. Ben was the name of the son. Garrett and I often talk about Ben and avoiding anymore “Bens” in the future.
NOTEBOOK: Tom and Gemma’s experiences in Yonder are quite different because of gender. I’m wondering how you thought about that?
FINNEGAN: Yeah, that’s one of the things that interested Imogen. When they get [trapped] in Yonder, they both react in different ways: Tom starts to dig a hole, and Gemma tries to figure the boy out. She basically thinks that the way to get out of there is to figure out the boy. Tom thinks the way to get out of there is to get more physical, and dig. The arrival of the boy in the box manipulates them into their roles, in a way. He comes between them, and that’s what pushes Tom to take on a sort of masculine “I’m going to work” type of a role; and for Gemma to be stuck with this bloody child, who is trying to manipulate her into having more maternal feelings towards him. Which she doesn’t, until Tom nearly kills him, and she becomes a bit protective. But I think this is just protective of not wanting to kill a living thing. She’s not saying “oh this is my little son”—throughout the film she never accepts him as her own.
NOTEBOOK: The creepy child who behaves like an adult or sees beyond is a trope in genre cinema. How did you build the young boy as a character?
FINNEGAN: There’s so many creepy child films. We tried to do something original and wanted him to be a little Pinocchio, angelic looking boy. But he obviously still needs to look a bit like Martin the estate agent. We didn’t want him to [be overtly evil] or have any aggressive plan to take over the world or anything, because that’s not the way this kind of parasitism works. The child is always just supposed to mimic them and grows rapidly—the same speed as a dog—in order to learn how to act like a human, so he can pass off as one. That’s his primary goal really: get fed, stay alive, and learn how to act as a human. Although that is creepy, for him he’s just doing his thing. He learns from the TV and from his little educational book, just like kids these days learn from the internet and weird forms of organized education or religion or whatever.
NOTEBOOK: What was Senan Jennings, who plays him, like to direct?
FINNEGAN: Senan’s great—he’s only seven. We auditioned a lot of kids for this, mostly seven-year-olds just came in and they were shy, or nervous, couldn’t really remember their lines. Sennan sent in a self-tape, first of all, and he wore a little shirt and brushed his hair to the side. He did some mimicry. He did the play at the end of the bed, back and forth. Then he did that bit with the throat: he rolled his eyes back and made this weird sound. I was like, “holy shit, this kid!” He came in and was even better the second time. He read the script. I think his mum probably took out a few of the pages, but he knew what it was all about and understood who his character was and what it was that made him unnerving. He went method before shooting. His mom was telling me they’d be shopping in the supermarket and he’d be copying customers: like picking things up from the shelves and being in character two or three weeks before shooting.
NOTEBOOK: Did you toy around with the bleakness of the ending?
FINNEGAN: I was talking to Garrett about this earlier on. It seems like some people can’t handle bleak endings, but every time we were looking at edits of it, we found it quite funny. During the development process, people were asking if we could do something to help Gemma get out orescape, or maybe shesomehow messes up the whole system so it can never happen again. But, basically, the experience of watching the film is seeing the whole life cycle of these estate agents. Ever since the very first draft, it had the same ending. To me, the film is like life in three acts. It’s like youth at the beginning: they’re young and full of hopes and dreams and laughing with one another, then the middle act is like middle age: the child comes between them and they grow apart and argue over stupid things, then the third act is like old age where they regret arguing about stupid stuff and come back together, the child leaves them. Then they die. It’s quite reflective of life. Maybe people don’t want to acknowledge the fact that we’re all going to die. But we are.
NOTEBOOK: You work with the spaces you’re in to create really dynamic images. I noticed that your frames are often quite still, drawing our attention to subtly important or ethereal movement within them to produce a sense of the uncanny. I kept being reminded of Baroque paintings where mirrors make the space seem to recede eternally, and—of course—the doubling used by Surrealists. You’ve mentioned Magritte’s influence on the clouds in Vivarium, but could you talk a little more about how painting influences your filmmaking?
FINNEGAN: I gather images. I went to art college and studied graphic design; I didn’t study film. I kind of taught myself some animation things and then got into live action. So, my reference points aren’t always other movies. Weirdly, I think, in Vivarium is The Witches directed by Nicholas Roeg. Do you remember there was a scene with a little girl trapped in a painting? She moved around in different spots day by day, and she got older, and then one day she was just gone. I always found that really affecting as a kid, and quite nightmarish. I think some of that came across in Vivarium as well, these people stuck in something that looked a little bit like a painting. But Giorgio de Chirico as well. I’m not hugely into Surrealists, but with this film it was fitting for that surreal world. And now it feels very surreal out and about, with streets that are totally still, oppressive grey skies in Dublin at the moment.We’re working on a new film Goliath and its completely based on a painting of David and Goliath.
NOTEBOOK: Which one?
FINNEGAN: It’s the one that’s in the National Gallery of Ireland by Orazio Gentileschi. It’s basically Goliath down on the ground with his hands up, begging not to be beheaded by this young teenage David. That’s basically inspired an entire script, which we’re on the second draft of at the moment.
NOTEBOOK: Vivarium’s subterranean twist, where Gemma pulls the curb of the road up and finds this whole world, recalled Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite to me…
FINNEGAN: That actually came from painting as well! We were trying to figure out where she would go that would be completely unexpected. I used to live in London. Around Camden where I was living there were a lot of Banksys and there’s that painting of a maid sweeping everything under this curtain—it looks like she’s pulling away at the wall and sweeping everything underneath.
We actually shot some additional scenes, showing more of the subterranean and decided to take them out. There’s practical reasons in terms of finishing them off and all these kinds of effects, but in the edit it felt more existentially nightmarish that you never leave Yonder. You kind of leave Yonder, but it all closes in on itself which felt tighter and more oppressive.
NOTEBOOK: Your work contains glimmers of multiple genres, but what joins them all is the idea of “the weird”—there’s this slowness to the action that really pays off and an eerie ambiguity that drapes over everything. Does the Weird or cosmic horror resonate with you at all?
FINNEGAN: Yeah! I love all that stuff. Strange Tales. I think I watched a lot of weird stuff when I was young. I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey when I was, like, ten. I think that’s when I realized films can be quite dreamy and abstract, and if they are they can last quite a lot longer in your memory or subconscious. Everything doesn’t have to be literal.
NOTEBOOK: What films were on your mind when making Vivarium?
FINNEGAN: It’s hard to tell. Vivarium was supposed to be my first film. It was taking so long to finance and it was a very slow kind of development process, so we decided to make Without Name, and that came together really quickly. It was a low budget film, and fully financed by Screen Ireland. So we were working Vivarium and watching things for Vivarium, while working on Without Name and watching things for Without Name. So there’s a bit of a blend between the two. With Without Name we werewatching things like The Long Weekend, Walkabout,and other Nicholas Roeg films, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and those films that are quite folk horror-ish or dealing with the liminal and strange. For Vivarium, I was looking at stuff in terms of aesthetic. Things like Roy Andersson’s films: Pigeon Sat on a Branch Contemplating Its Existence, Songs from the Second Floor, and stuff like that in terms of the lighting because we were going to build the set to create the environment of Yonder. Also the photography of Gregory Crewdson, the light artist Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project at the Tate with this big fake sun, and Saul Bass’s film Phase IV used a lot of cross dissolves and stuff that was quite 1970s. Then, Teshigahara’s film The Woman in the Dunes and Antonioni’s Red Desert with the space: this lonely, weird environment. The photography of Andreas Gursky shows a lot of repetition which can become quite creepy, especially from these big wide aerials. This film called The Quiet Earth, by Jeff Murphy—it’s a Kiwi movie where a guy wakes up in the morning and there’s nobody around. I remember watching that early on in reference to Vivarium. Probably Lost Highway and even Blue Velvet a little bit. Todd Haynes’s Safe was quite an influence on both Foxes and Vivarium.
NOTEBOOK: I’ve noticed a lot of people are watching Safe right now. I think it would be an amazing double feature with Vivarium. Your film is coming out at a weird time, but I also think the tone of your body of work is especially resonant right now. When you think about the future of your cinematic worldbuilding, what do you want to prioritize?
FINNEGAN: We’re set to shoot the new film in September, which hopefully will still be possible. In addition to Goliath, there’s this other one called Nocebo, which is the opposite of a placebo and Latin for “I will harm.” It’s about a Filipino nanny and a fashion designer, and about how the lives of these two women clash and intertwine. It’s about fast fashion really, and exploitation of the east by the west. That’s more of a supernatural thriller in the vein of something like Don’t Look Now.
NOTEBOOK: Exploitation is a theme for you and Garrett.
FINNEGAN: Well, there’s a lot of exploitation going on! I think part of the fuel that keeps you going to make a film, because it takes years, is being really annoyed by something. Something that bothers you can keep bothering you for long enough to create an entire movie. I think that’s why we end up making these films that are about our sociopolitical world.
1. VanderMeer, Ann and Jeff. "Introduction." The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Tales. Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. Tor Books, 2012.