The Lobster
3/5
“Now, the fact that you’ll turn into an animal if you fail to fall in love with somebody during your stay [at the hotel] is not something that should upset you, or get you down.” These are words spoken by the hotel manager to David (played by Colin Farrell) in The Lobster (2016), and they showcase the dark and pointed humour that gives this film its spark and helps it along through what could have potentially been a very dreary two hours.
“A wolf and a penguin could never live together; neither could a camel and a hippopotamus. That would be absurd,” David is told, again showing that The Lobster is at its best when it is being sardonically outrageous; a wolf and a penguin living together is surely no more absurd than turning all people without life partners into wolves and penguins.
What I liked most about The Lobster was its matter-of-fact way of addressing the absurdities of its own plot; it could have taken the insipidly self-serious route that many recent dystopian films—namely, the Divergent and Maze Runner movies—have gone.
However, there are confounding elements of The Lobster that cause the film to drag and take away from the statement director Yorgos Lanthimos is trying to make.
For example, in the first half of the movie, there’s a clear and common goal for the people in the hotel: find somebody to love. But during the second half, when the film moves away from the hotel, I found myself wondering where it was going and why; the characters lose the driving force they had in the beginning and instead spend their time doing inexplicable things for inexplicable reasons.
Coupled with this is the deliberately stilted dialogue; characters sometimes wait a full five seconds before responding to an innocent question. Why is this? What are they thinking? Or, rather, what was Lanthimos thinking?
I had similar problems with Blade Runner (1982) and Artificial Intelligence (2001), where many of the main characters seemed to have merely humanoid ways of expressing their emotions. Both of those films succeeded, though, because many of the main characters were, in fact, humanoids—an excuse that The Lobster cannot use.
Worse still, The Lobster’s core concepts are specifically human oriented: how human relations are forged; how strange a thing love is, and that so much emphasis is put on it; how society pressures people into falling in love. These elements are all addressed in the film, but meaningful conclusions are forgone when its characters do not act like human beings.
If you want a film that delivers a dark chuckle every now and then and has intriguing, if thinly veiled, opinions about the societal construct of love, then this movie is for you. If you go to the movies to see people act like actual people, steer clear.