The Exquisite Eeriness of Bird Horrors Part I: 'Vivarium' (2020)

Is "Bird Horror" becoming a new, intriguingly strange trend in contemporary horror?

Tom and Emma with the changeling

This is the first installment of a three-part series.

What is a “Bird Horror?”

It would be too vague and imprecise to define the term “Bird Horror” as a creature feature with vicious and monstrous birds. Or, at least, it’d be an inaccurate description of the three movies I'll cover in this series. They’re eerily disturbing, hard-to-define flicks that don’t fit into any usual horror subgenre. Story-wise, each of them differs, yet there’s a common thread that inadvertently connects them to each other. It’s the peculiarly frightening and off-putting ways of “humans” internalizing an animalistic, bird-like behavior to transform themselves into feral and bizarre entities. They aren’t human beings but not animals either. What are they then? Let’s find out.

Vivarium and The Cuckoo People

Vivarium tells you upfront it’s a Bird Horror but doesn’t specify how. It’s an unsettling, challenging movie on a first watch because you’re unaware of what to look for and how to interpret a variety of scenes that seem odd and nonsensical at first. But starting with its pivotal opening sequence of a cuckoo pushing out hatchlings from their nest to claim it as its own, Lorcan Finnegan’s feature knows exactly what it’s doing. And it uses every tool at its disposal to deliver us to a devastating conclusion.

The cold open connects directly to Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) and Emma (Imogen Poots), our protagonist couple, who find the dead hatchlings at the bottom of a tree and bury them diligently. They’re a happy couple in their 30s, openly affectionate with each other, looking to find their first cozy home (what their landscaper and school teacher salary can afford) to potentially raise their kids in one day. That leads them to real estate agent Martin (Jonathan Aris making you uncomfortable from the first moment), eager to sell a place in the suburbs called Yonder.

Martin is as disturbing and repellent as a real estate guy can be. Everything he says sounds like a pre-recorded and robotic sales pitch he likely repeats to every unlucky soul who wanders into his sterile office. His visage is unnaturally stiff, his demeanor a cape of creepiness. That’s because he’s what I’ll call a Cuckoo People — he’s not human but does his best impression to mimic one.

When he takes Emma and Tom to Yonder (a suburban development populated with identical green houses) and shows them around in Apartment #9, he does a frightening imitation of repeating Emma's words. His mimicry is fast and brief but instantly rubs you the wrong way. Martin doesn’t want to sell the house. He’s simply testing whether the couple is a good enough subject for what he needs them for. When the latter says they don’t have children yet, he gets the confirmation he wants and soon disappears.

After Martin vanishes, Emma and Tom quickly learn they’re trapped. There’s no way out of Yonder — and once they attempt to leave in every possible way humans can think of, left with no choice, they settle in. The houses there are essentially nests. They give you the illusion of homes, but once you step foot in them, you realize they’re barren environments like laboratories serving a sole purpose. This is the land of Cuckoo People — closely observing and monitoring every human being they can trap inside it — a species dedicated to studying and copying our behavior to force us to raise their offspring. (Warning: Spoilers from here on out.)

Martin scares me to death

That’s Not a Boy

Besides being a Bird Horror, Vivarium is also a changeling story. A few days in, Emma and Tom receive a baby in a box that says, “Raise the child and be released.” Except it isn’t a child — at least not a human one. It grows frightfully fast (aging about 10 years in 100 days), speaks in the unnerving voice of an adult male, and its scream is deafening like a siren. The “boy” (played by a creepily mesmerizing Senan Jennings) also resembles Martin's features, and we can never rule out that it might be his progeny.

Despite being “raised” among real people, the boy never behaves as humans do. It furiously screams the moment it’s hungry, watches and mimics the couple with dead eyes, and stares at a TV that only screens abstract black-and-white patterns. Yet, as opposed to all these ominous signs, it’s not evil. It has no concept of feelings. It acts on the basic instincts (anger, hunger, fear, pleasure) of an animal. No matter how it’s treated by Emma and Tom (with gentleness or hostility), it never develops a desire for affection or retaliation. It simply strives for survival.

The Horrifying Unknown and the Cruel Circle of Life

Vivarium is a widely misunderstood movie by both critics and viewers. It has virtually nothing to do with the often bleak and empty suburban lifestyle, the ups and downs of marriage, or the difficulties of parenting. From its first moment, it aims to depict foreignness, unfamiliarity, and an undecipherable phenomenon to humans. As Jude Doyle writes in their own analysis, “The horror of Vivarium is realizing that humans are animals.” The Cuckoo People aren’t monsters but a species in our society that man is unacquainted with. They trap humans to bring up their offspring like cuckoos do because that’s their natural process after reproduction. The reason it’s terrifying and deeply upsetting to watch this happen is because they pretend to be like us.

Yonder only has the mere basics needed for human life. Its houses aren’t warm, inviting, comfortable homes because those aspects are irrelevant. The drink and food supplied by the Cuckoo People have no taste since they don’t have to nourish good health — they just need to keep people alive. Everything's fake because all things serve as an illusion to appeal to humans and imprison them until they do their part and raise the brood. Once they do, and once they cease to have any more use, death is a natural final stage and conclusion to their existence.

The essence of Bird Horrors — for which they’re horrific, unearthly, and nauseating — is observing mysterious creatures we don’t know or understand. Weird beings with physical human characteristics that live among us in disguise, and we're incapable of recognizing or identifying them as such. They follow the behavior of birds, but they could easily be aliens from another planet that learned to deceive us flawlessly, inhabiting a life on Earth we’re unaware of. Essentially, they infiltrated our society in a faultless concealment so much so that we can’t tell them apart from ourselves by simply looking at them.

The “boy” all grown up

Tom and Emma are here to represent our bafflement, disgust, and curiosity, functioning as a bridge to help us comprehend this scenario from the perspective of a living and feeling human being. But, primarily speaking, Vivarium isn’t about them. Thus their fate — regardless of how bleak and tragic it might be — doesn’t fully encompass the message the movie wants to leave us with.

Death is rarely followed by grief and sorrow in the animal world. In the end, Martin expires and is replaced by the "boy," who's now grown and fully capable of carrying on its role in the species. The natural cycle (at least in the context of the film) is now complete. And the frightening truth is that we can’t exclude ourselves from it just because we’re compassionate human beings. Ultimately, we’re animals, too.

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Next up: Hatching.

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