Jason Clarke and Ben Whishaw join Dogtooth director Yorgos Lanthimos' pretty weird-sounding movie

By Kevin McFarland | October 23, 2013 | 8:50pm

Aux Features Film

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2009 film Dogtooth was a supremely unsettling story of a family’s sheltered existence. An uneasy black comedy containing shocking domestic violence, the film brought Lanthimos to the world stage and scored a Best Foreign Film nomination. After following up with another film in Greek, 2011's Alps, Lanthimos is now set to make his English-language debut. The Lobster, co-written by Lanthimos and longtime collaborator Efthymis Filippou, will be an “unconventional love story…in a dystopian future where finding a partner is a matter of life and death.”

That basic logline sort-of makes the film sound like an adaptation of Futurama’s “Why Must I Be A Crustacean In Love?” but a more detailed synopsis from Twitch reveals more of the surreal bent Lanthimos is known for: The Lobster takes place in a society that arrests single people and imprisons them in a hotel with 45 days to find a suitable mate, or else be morphed into "an animal of their choosing" and released into the woods. Deadline reports that Jason Clarke (Zero Dark Thirty, The Great Gatsby), Ben Whishaw (Skyfall, The Hour) Léa Seydoux (Blue Is The Warmest Color), and Olivia Colman (Broadchurch) have all signed on to star as some of those single people/animals, with shooting set to begin in the spring.