There are worse fates than being single for the rest of your life.
You could be single for the rest of your life after being unwillingly transformed, not by Kafkaesque metamorphosis but by the sharp and sterile tools of surgery, into the animal of your choice. Most choose dogs, but you could opt for the lobster, whose positive attributes include longevity and blue blood — very aristocratic.
That’s the delightfully surreal premise of The Lobster, as original as anything you’re likely to see at the movies this year. It’s disappointing, then, that this weird modern fable ultimately arrives at the clichéd message of so many other films, substituting some hand-waving about the redemptive power of love for any more challenging conclusions about relationships. Despite its vicious deadpan humor and its profoundly odd sensibility, it’s another love story.
Still, what a strange love story it is.
Colin Farrell is David, recently dumped, slouching and mustachioed in a pair of khakis. He is sent to live at a resort operated by draconian matchmakers and populated by single men and women. David has 45 days to find a better half before he is doomed to a long life scuttling the ocean floor, or a much shorter life boiling in a pot of water. The challenge is complicated by the apparent fact that he can only match with someone who shares a seemingly superficial “defining characteristic”: a limp, a propensity for nosebleeds, a heartless demeanor.
Should he fail to sink Cupid’s arrow into a partner, he can extend his stay at the concentration camp-singles retreat by sinking tranquilizer darts into the loners who have fled into the woods and zealously embraced a loveless lifestyle.
These escapees spend their time digging their own graves, masturbating, dancing alone to electronic music, and plotting against happy couples — typical single behavior, in other words. The punishment for flirtation here is as severe as the penalties doled out to the lonesome bachelors back at the hotel, but the bespectacled David eventually finds a similarly nearsighted kindred spirit (Rachel Weisz) among their number.
Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth), making his English-language feature debut, presents the film’s absurdist world matter-of-factly, which makes the humor and the horror sing all the louder. The Lobster cracks into society’s ideas about relationships with great relish, even if the point Lanthimos is trying to make sometimes seems muddy. (A distrust of any kind of societal prescription for romantic fulfillment does come through loud and clear.)
If he doesn’t have a defined point of view, he certainly has an effective aesthetic. Lanthimos drops you into a simmering pot of weirdness and cranks up the heat so slowly you don’t even notice how bizarre things have become. That rule-breaking spirit suffuses, and to a degree masks, what is essentially a fairly traditional boy-meets-girl tale.
The film may not have anything new to say about relationships. But if you can say the same things with this much panache, who cares?
