15 Movies Like Vivarium That Sci-Fi Fans Need To See

If you missed "Vivarium" in the theater, you're not alone. It was released on VOD and "in theaters" on March 27th, 2020, which is to say a few scattered theaters in foreign countries, as nearly every movie theater in the U.S. was closed under shelter-in-place orders at the time. But then, most of us had plenty of downtime to rent it, or catch it eventually on Amazon Prime.

In a dreary irony, much like the movie "Contagion" took on a new popularity when the pandemic initially struck, "Vivarium" ended up hitting eerily close to home. It stars Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots as a young couple who tour a home in a cookie-cutter suburb, then find themselves unable to escape the neighborhood. Although there are mysterious, likely alien forces responsible for their predicament (who also demand that they raise a mysterious alien child), most of the film is a study of two characters dealing with paranoia, social isolation, and fear when they're unable to leave their house.

As the world re-opens in waltzing, fumbling steps, many of us still may feel detached and isolated at times and have a lot of emotions to process in the pandemic's wake. Here are 15 films to watch after "Vivarium," if you need to witness some characters deal with a movie reality as messed up as the real one has felt lately.

In many films, the suburbs are a metaphor for a particular sort of stifling boredom, or the social pressures of conforming to a certain nuclear-family suburban ideal. But Jordan Peele's smash success "Get Out" reminded us that those concerns are all rooted in privilege to begin with, most often white privilege specifically. From the perspective of a Black protagonist, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), the idyllic upper-class setting of "Get Out" takes on a much more insidious, terrifying aura that befits the long history of redlining in the suburbs and oppression in America as a whole. Though it's set on sprawling estate in upstate New York, the suffocation is as palpable in the interpersonal and cultural dynamics of "Get Out" as it is in the claustrophobic surroundings of "Vivarium."

For the first half of "Get Out," we watch Chris meet the family of his new, white girlfriend (Allison Williams), and we soon start shouting the title of the movie at the screen as more and more creepy things begin to happen. The second half enters straight-up cathartic thriller territory, and the entirety of the plot gives new meaning to the phrase "body horror." With a show-stopping climax, it's exactly the sort of thing to watch if the more cryptic "Vivarium" ending left you wanting resolution.

In "The One I Love," Mark Duplass and Elizabeth Moss play Ethan and Sophie, a couple who take a weekend getaway to a mysterious estate suggested by their therapist. There, incredibly, they meet exact doppelgangers of each other, and the new versions of them seem to be true "2.0" versions with more positive, loving attitudes.

It's a bit more of a fantastical tone than "Vivarium" (Ethan and Sophie decide to just hang out with the doppelgangers and see how it goes?), but the premise allows for a much deeper mediation on what it means to be a partner in a relationship — what it means to be your "best self" around someone. Is the idealized version of your partner something they rely on you to help them live up to? Or is it a phantom, an unrealistic ideal that threatens, in this case quite literally, to tear you apart? "The One I Love" manages to ponder all these questions and still make time for some classic "which is which?" doppelganger hijinks.

Talking to yourself: We've all done it. Especially for those of us living alone when quarantine hit in 2020, the early stages of the pandemic were sort of like living all alone on an isolated moon base. This would make Duncan Jones' 2009 movie "Moon" a particularly fun and relatable watch, as Sam Bell (played by the incomparable Sam Rockwell) finds himself in that exact situation. The lone employee of a lunar mining station, at first he only has a robot for company, but he soon starts talking to himself in a very literal sense.

Sam discovers another Sam Bell in a wrecked lunar rover, and together they unearth horrifying truth about the company they work for. Rockwell gives a tour de force dual performance as both Sams and really gets to the heart of how difficult it can be to live with yourself a lot of time, especially when alienation forces you to confront harsh realities as they truly are.

A masterpiece of suspense, Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby" is arguably one of the highest standards by which all other psychological horror films are judged. Mia Farrow plays a young woman who moves into a gothic apartment building with her new husband, becomes pregnant, and slowly grows suspicious of every aspect of her new life. A friend warns her that the building has an occult past, the tenants all seem to harbor mysterious secrets, and her husband is dismissive of her concerns, even when she starts to feel severe pains and lose weight.

It all comes to a head, of course, in the film's famous final scene, where the truth about her child is revealed and Rosemary has a choice to make. Though the specifics are a bit different, these circumstances closely echo those of the characters in "Vivarium." It's a classic case of all the clues pointing in the direction of a reveal that manages to be shocking even if it isn't particularly surprising for the audience: Like everyone around Rosemary, we know something she doesn't. And the resulting drama is delicious.

The chief setting of "Vivarium" is a house that the unfortunate protagonists are unable to get away from — which ultimately means they can't get away from each other, either. The attendees at the dinner party in "Coherence" would definitely commiserate from their captivity in their own inexplicable tesseract. In this low-budget 2013 puzzle box movie, a comet passing near the Earth causes a citywide blackout, except for one house at the end of the block from our main characters. But it's not a symbol of hope: They realize quickly that the house looks eerily similar to their own.

Soon they discover that inside, there are alternate versions of themselves as well. In a mess of confusion, the characters devise ways to keep track of who is who while deciding what to do next. Are the people in the other house the enemy? In a clever, taut screenplay, all of the early grievances and arguments from the beginning of the party come to play amidst the chaos between the characters, both real and impostors.

There's a certain comfort in inevitability. It's almost relaxing, in a way, when you get to the parts late in "Vivarium" when the main characters have accepted that they're trapped. In that vein, Lars von Trier's "Melancholia" offers that same sense of acceptance in the face of finality, but on a global scale.

Written as a treatise on depression, the 2011 film could function equally well as a commentary on climate change. Basically, an Earth-sized planet called Melancholia appears in the solar system on a collision course with Earth, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Of course, in the case of climate change, there is much that can be done. But an individual's psychological awareness of looming calamity is a sobering reality in "Melancholia" that many of us can identify with when it comes to climate change — and the pandemic, as well.

But as other characters despair and lament, Kirsten Dunst's main character Justine, who has been suffering from severe depression up to that point, suddenly recovers herself and becomes calm and stoic in the face of impending doom. As von Trier told the Danish Film Institute, "When the Earth is ready to crumble between our fingers, whatever we do in the way of heroic conquests or petty family squabbles doesn't matter."

If "Vivarium" seems like a story about quarantine, it's tempting to read "The Mist" as a very prescient story about how conflicting the human responses to an emergency can be. As a mysterious mist filled with horrifying, Lovecraftian creatures envelops a small town, several townspeople become trapped in a supermarket. Some work together to barricade the doors and try to stay safe, while other skeptics head outside and walk headlong into death. A religious fanatic convinces several others to make sacrifices. It's clear that a wide range of ideology is represented by these characters, and their clashing convictions can have disastrous consequences in the face of a mortal threat.

Unlike the pandemic, this mysterious catastrophe does turn out to be a government conspiracy of sorts, as a nearby military base may be to blame for opening a rift in dimensions. But be warned: Like "Vivarium" and unlike director Frank Darabont's other two Stephen King adaptations ("The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green Mile"), "The Mist" doesn't have what you'd call an uplifting ending.