Having kids and buying a house become the stuff of nightmares in Lorcan Finnegan’s black
comedy, starring Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg
There’s a type of film you could call burbstruck: horrified and yet sort of fascinated by the blank, bland, affectless sprawl of the suburbs in all their conformity and philistinism. Here is the
American dream, a becalmed prosperity. But what unresolved yearnings lie behind the white picket fences and intensively manicured lawns? What suppressed needs have coagulated there? In David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, a severed human ear is found in the soil, signalling a hypersensitivity to subterranean stirrings of something really strange. Sam Mendes’s American Beauty – perhaps the most famous burbstricken film of modern times – found in the moonscape of a suburban development a liberating exoticism and eroticism. (Not all film-makers make an ironised fetish of the suburbs, though: Steven Spielberg often treasures the reassuring normality.)
Now director Lorcan Finnegan and his co-screenwriter Garret Shanley tap into this residential nightmare for a comic horror parable, which I found highly entertaining and bizarre. It’s a bad dream of what it means to settle down somewhere affordable because you’ve got a child to look after. Or maybe it’s the very fact of having a child that creates its own suburbanism of the soul, a marginalisation of lived experience.