Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2015 English-language debut gets a lot done in its swiftly moving two-hour run through Kafka’s guide to love. On a meta level, it completed Colin Farrell’s efforts to shed the Hollywood pretty boy image unnaturally bolted to him by a clearly baffled studio system in the early 2000s. (Farrell notably gained forty pounds and an unflattering mustache for his turn as the movie’s “romantic lead,” David, a part that sees him invert his copious natural charisma into a sort of magnetic anti-charm.) Courtesy of bone-dry performances from Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz, The Lobster also laid the casting groundwork that would see Lanthimos break into the Academy mainstream four years later with The Favourite. It set off about a billion different red flags for Does The Dog Die? Above all else, it proved that Lanthimos (working with his frequent collaborator Efthimis Filippou) could write a script about love and sex just as brutally funny and off-putting in English as his earlier Dogtooth had been in his native Greek.
Set in a world where the government-mandated penalty for being single is transformation into the animal of your choosing (unless you’re a rebel, in which case you get stuck as what the film, in its typically hilarious economy of detail, only ever tells us is “the animal no one wants to be”), Lanthimos’ romantic and sexual satire deftly demonstrates the difference between “world-building” and simply getting on with the work of building a world.
The characters trapped at the mid-tier resort hotel where the unseen rulemakers send people unlucky enough to have had their spouses leave them or die may occasionally question the system they’re stuck in. (In one of the movie’s funniest moments, David protests the mandatory, but incomplete, sexual stimulation from the hotel staff, meant to spur guests into desperate romantic connections, with a hopelessly pathetic “That’s awful. Just awful.”) But the rules have been so internalized by all involved, and backed up by “for your own good” platitudes from Colman’s hotel manager, that even those who try to escape them wind up building walls just as restrictive for themselves. Even if you can escape the flying tranquilizer darts and the looming threat of “The Red Kiss,” Lanthimos argues, you can’t get away from the rulemakers installed in your own head.
Yet, somehow, The Lobster is also Lanthimos’ funniest movie, as well as his most paradoxically romantic. The movie frontloads its comedy into its first half, highlighting John C. Reilly and Ben Whishaw as fellow sadsacks at the resort who fall into miserable, lovelorn friendship with David. (Whishaw’s character is six days past the death of his wife, and walks with a limp after making an ill-fated visit to his mother, who was turned into a wolf, at the zoo.) Colman shines especially bright in these early portions, deploying a deadpan sharpened over years of British TV comedy to make the most of lines like, “If you encounter any problems, any tensions, any arguing, that you cannot resolve yourselves, you will be assigned children. That usually helps.” (To say nothing of enforcing the hotel’s draconian policies on sexual self-gratification; the lawmakers in One Night Only might be okay with their subjects rubbing one out, but the authorities of The Lobster are far less lenient on the DIY mindset.)
But Lanthimos reserves his sharpest points for the film’s second half, which sees David successfully fall in love with Weisz’s character. Despite being predicated on an absurdity—both characters bond obsessively over the fact that they’re shortsighted, part of the film’s nastier and wider satire about the superficial and arbitrary similarities we’re drawn to in partners—the romance manages to be genuinely sweet and affecting, even if it often sounds like it’s being conducted between two broken robots. Lanthimos does believe in the power of love, it turns out. He just doesn’t believe said power actually amounts to much in the face of other, more potent forces—which is, in its own way, an idea a thousand times more dystopian than a tattoo that rats you out to Uncle Sam when you fuck.
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