The resort hotel where the first half of The Lobster is set will remind some viewers of the resort town of that 1960s cult television show, “The Prisoner.” The Lobster’s hotel is nestled in a beautiful nexus of sea, hills and woodlands; there’s never a wait on the golf course; the white linen restaurant is superb; the rooms are elegant.
As in “The Prisoner,” the place is a bit strange with peculiar rules and boundaries. At check-in, protagonist David (Colin Farrell) answers a raft of personal questions from the anodyne receptionist. With a shrug he declares himself heterosexual after learning that bisexual is not a category. All the hotel guests must dress according to their gender in identical togs handed to them at their orientation. Choice of shoe size is as limited as choice of sexual preference: David wants nine and a half but is told curtly that there are no halves. And then things get really weird.
The Lobster is interesting to a point, but eventually undermined by writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos’ irrepressible urge to accumulate bizarre digressions and perverse anecdotes suggesting that the human condition is not only irredeemable but utterly insane. He might have been well advised to have kept The Lobster within the confines of the resort hotel; inside those boundaries the screenplay functions as a sharp satire of social attitudes on relationships—especially the doubtful pairing of couples and the tendency to ostracize singles. Once David escapes into the woods, Lanthimos’ sardonic dystopia gets lost in a thicket of weirdness for its own sake.
Lop off that last half and you have something worth the suspension of disbelief. The Lobster occurs in a society where widows and widowers are sent to resorts and given 45 days to find a suitable partner amongst their fellow guests. Failing that, they will be turned into the animal of their choice (David opts for a beast less chosen: a lobster). The odd metaphysics provide a parameter within which the social pressure to mate is magnified. The Beckett-like banality of the dialogue transpires against a backdrop of absurdity. One of David’s fellow hotel guests, desperate to avoid the fate of becoming an animal, decides to woo a woman with chronic nosebleeds (Jessica Barden). To show that he has something in common with her, he painfully induces his own.
Wearing the protective mustache of a man uncertain of himself, Farrell plays David with the awkwardness of the shy new kid in school. Eventually he escapes the hotel by running for the woods, where he discovers a band of “loners”—singles at war with the system—but a totalitarian leader governs them and imposes her own bizarre regimen, placing obstacles between David and the woman he seems to fall for (Rachel Weisz). Alas, the mordant humor of The Lobster’s first half is undone by what happens as the minutes tick off toward the conclusion.
The Lobster
Colin Farrell
Rachel Weisz
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Rated R
