The Lobster is Yorgos Lanthimos’ first English speaking feature film starring Colin Farrell as David, a suddenly single man in a world similar to ours in which being single is outlawed. You have forty-five days to find a mate, or the single person gets turned into an animal. David chooses the titular animal in the worst-case scenario, but ends up exploring the path less taken as an unlikely rebel due to circumstance.
I would be a cat. I loved the first half of The Lobster. While it is absurd, exploring this world was delicious because it perfectly punctures the ridiculous nature of our own society. I can even attest to the fact that the seemingly arbitrary rules of compatibility and accommodations actually feel accurate. One reason that I hate going on retreats are the accommodations available to single people regardless of economic status. I’m a grown ass lawyer paying for the pleasure of sleeping on a bunk bed and sharing a bathroom with a train car amount of women while the couples get their own rooms and bathrooms. Never again! Society’s message is clear. You don’t deserve better than this until you start acting normal.
While I cackled at the sly comments about a child’s function for a couple in this society, I actually wanted Lanthimos to be more brutal here and fill in some holes, especially since David does seem to care about one aspect of his life more than even himself: his brother. In The Lobster’s world, where do children come from and are siblings biologically related or just related by circumstance? There are a lot of unexplained points such as how do you turn a person into an animal. I think that just accepting the absurdity and enjoying the ride works in most circumstances, but as a single person, particularly a cis gendered woman without children, I would have loved a custom Lanthimos skewering of the sacred, biological duty of having children. I also think that it is fair that he didn’t go there because write what you know is an aphorism for a good reason, and maybe he thought that Margaret Atwood had covered that ground adequately in Handmaid’s Tale.
The second half of The Lobster never quite mirrors then amplifies our society’s alternative to the marital ideal, the life of a single person and what a society governed by singleness as the ideal would look like. I suspect that this failing is due to Lanthimos’ lack of experience in the area, but generally his movies begin to lag at this point so I could be wrong. He should perhaps consider shortening his films instead of deeming two hours as the required length. It does start off provocatively promising as everyone dances alone to electronic music. Ea of terrorism is equally amusing.
I have to compliment Lanthimos on making Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz into his muses and frequent collaborators. They are great actors who don’t get enough recognition, but he centralizes them. When their characters organically discover what society mandates and what outlaw society forbids, it raises the horrifying thought that the human condition makes existence and authentic feelings impossible, which is a fair point. The majority of adult life is sorting through what you were learned, who you actually are and what you really want and even after those hard won epiphanies, those conclusions change over time. In spite of the weaknesses of the second half, Lanthimos manages to swing around and poke more fun at our society by walking a thin line
Lanthimos employs the Verfrendungseffekt, which means that actors deliberately use a monotone voice instead of a natural delivery to make the viewer consciously aware that the viewer is watching something and not be able to pretend that he or she is a fly on the wall watching something organically unfold. His narrative framing device, which I will not spoil, is brilliant, bittersweet and utterly devastating in retrospect. It almost made me want to rewatch the film.
Lanthimos’ play on the idea that love is blind is surrealistically taken to its most extreme conclusion, and if you feel inspired to play Taylor Dayne’s “Prove Your Love” after watching The Lobster, I would consider you a reasonable person. In comparison to his Greek language feature films, he pulls some punches because while he goes there, after watching Alps and Dogstooth, events could have been way worse, and he leaves a fair amount to the imagination, but trigger warning to animal lovers.
As an American English speaking viewer who is not as talented as Lanthimos, an artisan able to convey a message in multiple languages and mediums, I can finally relax a little bit and appreciate his work more than I could before. When I watched his Greek language films, I was not familiar with Greek films in general so I couldn’t distinguish whether certain aspects of his movie were customary of Greek films or a unique stylistic choice so now I can definitely understand that he is surrealistic by choice. Because I’m not completely dependent on subtitles and am familiar with the actors, I have more bandwidth to appreciate his rigorous framing and composition of every scene. His films are visually beautiful even if they are innately unsettling. Usually I don’t like it when niche directors make it big, but if Lanthimos did it for the money, I’m glad because it has diluted him enough for my consumption.
While I normally find Lanthimos’ films disturbing, after The Favourite, I think that The Lobster is his most approachable film. I have no idea if his Greek language feature films are funny, but I am shocked to discover that Lanthimos has a morbid sense of humor that I could finally appreciate. The fault probably lies with me, not him. He is not my cup of tea, but at least now I don’t want to puke after watching his films. A strong visceral response of any kind is a compliment.