The lobster

(Ireland/United Kingdom/Greece 2015)

Dir: Yorgos Lanthimos

118 mins

Cast: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Léa Seydoux

Rating: MA15+

The Lobster, a black-hearted flat-affect comedy from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, making his English-language debut, presents a dystopian world where being single is a criminal act. A romantic breakup thrusts the “single” into the outer darkness of society. (Like all good satire, The Lobster is close enough to reality to disturb the waters.) A single person has 45 days after a breakup to find a new partner, and if the new partner does not materialize, the single person will be turned into an animal. The message is clear: Couples deserve official protection, and the privilege of being left alone by the unnamed State. Single people are accosted in public spaces with demands for appropriate papers. The Lobster plays rigorously by its own rules without once telegraphing “Just kidding!” While extremely funny, it is a bitter and ruthless film. Lanthimos plays target practice and his aim is deadly.

... as The Lobster marches towards its conclusion, it becomes clear that it intends to go the distance. Lanthimos will not cop out on what his film has unleashed. In a world devoted to happy endings, where platitudes like “the right person is out there waiting for you” or “someday your Prince will come” are parroted as Unquestioned Truths, the film is a welcome breath of freezing cold, poisoned air.

Sheila O'Malley, RogerEbert.com

... Lanthimos’ vision of comic despair finds its visual expression in cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis’ slate-gray compositions and Jacqueline Abrahams’ production design. Interior spaces are oppressive. Narrow corridors and narrower staircases lead to banquet rooms and swimming pools that feel like fish tanks, chambers without escape hatches, built specifically to suffocate human beings. The natural world outside The Hotel is shelterless; Loners are soaked by rain in the woods, stranded in wide open fields, or hounded by literal relationship police who roam public spaces.

And none of it is all that far from real-world truth. The genuine, human search for love is routinely exploited by the world around us. It spawns bizarrely unreal romantic comedies, Nicholas Sparks novels, terrible hookup apps, The Bachelor, colossally expensive destination weddings, weird anti-Valentine’s Day parties, and suicidal songs about breakups where the singer usually asserts that not to have “you” is to “have nothing.” If Lanthimos’ gloom-vision is decidedly more blunt, it’s no less accurate an assessment of every heartless thing human beings already inflict on one another. His is a wild, sad, mordantly funny dystopia, but one that gives sexual desperation the bad name it deserves.

Dave White, The Wrap