The Lobster

The Lobster (15)

Ireland/UK/Greece 2015 118 mins Dir: Yorgos Lanthimos Cast: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Lea Seydoux, Ben Whishaw, John C. Reilly, Olivia Colman

Anyone who saw director Yorgos Lanthimos’ savagely satirical Dogtooth will know he’s a director who doesn’t play by the rules. And he’s gleefully torn them up again in the enjoyably absurd, utterly bizarre The Lobster, his English-language debut.

It’s a futuristic satire although the main source of delight is how the film’s offbeat universe appears to be just a couple of tweaks away from the one we’re currently living in. We’re introduced to Colin Farrell’s character David when he discovers his wife’s unfaithfulness; he’s then transported to an unnamed hotel where he has 45 days to find his ideal life partner. Failure to comply will result in him transforming into an animal of his choosing; David chooses a lobster because, in his words, they live for 100 years and remain fertile all their lives. His choice is complimented by the stoic hotel manager (Olivia Colman) who remarks, brilliantly, that most people choose dogs, a development that has threatened to turn all other animal species extinct.

Where the film really works is in its opening hour, the very ordinariness of the hotel’s surroundings serving to heighten Lanthimos’ acidic sense of humour. What we’re witness to is a darkly hilarious dissection of the mating ritual, as David and the rest of the hotel’s incumbents are forced to circle around their potential mates in order to ensure their own survival – as a human, at any rate. With David receiving unwelcome attention from Ashley Jensen’s desperately lonely Biscuit Woman, he then decides to feign his apparent compatibility with the Heartless Woman (Angeliki Papoulia). Meanwhile, Ben Whishaw’s Limping Man finds a novel – and shocking – way of attracting Nosebleed Woman (Jessica Barden). How he does so encapsulates the tone of Lanthimos’ movie: surreal, silly yet with a genuine undercurrent of savagery.

Unfortunately, the movie struggles to find the wood for the trees when David, rebelling against the system in true Orwellian fashion, flees into the nearby forest to live with the Loners, rebels who exert an equally strict relationship policy as the Hotel but in a different way. Whereas there he was encouraged to find a sexual partner, here the opposite approach is advocated, the law laid down by Lea Seydoux’s calculating leader. Nevertheless, it’s here that David meets and falls in love with the Short-Sighted Woman (Rachel Weisz), whose gloriously dry, near-monotone narration further helps set the scene.

With the leafy scenery blending into something of a monothematic blur and the movie’s theme of genuine love vs. ritualistic pretence ultimately becoming somewhat overstretched, there’s no denying that the second act is a bit trying. Nevertheless, with a clutch of well-judged central performances expertly walking the divide between detachment and engagement, and plenty of darkly hilarious moments, there’s no denying that Lanthimos, in his typical style, has fashioned a one-of-a-kind drama with plenty of intriguing things to say about the nature of human relationships.