The Lobster

*CONTAINS SPOILERS*

So yesterday I watched The Lobster (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos). It came up on my Netflix recommendations and the tagline seemed strange and I like strange films so I pressed play.

The world that The Lobster is set in is one where everyone has to have a partner. If they don't have a partner, you are sent to a hotel where you have 45 days to find one. If you don't find one at the end of the aforementioned days, you are turned into an animal of your choosing. The main character in this film, David (Colin Farrell), when asked which animal he wants to turn into, says he wants to be turned into a lobster because "lobsters live for over one hundred years, are blue blooded like aristocrats, and stay fertile all their lives. [He] also likes the sea very much".

The plot line is reasonably predictable, but the way it happens isn't. There are similarities between our actual society and the one presented in The Lobster, sure, which makes it incredibly clever, but the initial "wait, what?" at the beginning of the film takes hold for the rest of it. The film is narrated throughout by a character the audience only knows as Short Sighted Woman (Rachel Weisz), David's love interest for the last half of the film.

During David's stay at the hotel, he fails to fall in love with someone. He does meet someone and pretends to have something in common with them, but he leaves her and runs away from the hotel when she kicks his dog (who happens to be his brother) to death in their bathroom. David joins the Loner gang - a collective of people who have all escaped the hotel and live in the forest - and falls in love with Short Sighted Woman there. But, contrastingly to the hotel and rest of the world, you're not allowed to fall in love if you're a Loner. David and the Short Sighted Woman create their own coded language because they can't talk to each other. Short Sighted Woman says in the narration, "we’ve developed a code so that we can communicate with each other, even in front of the others, without them knowing what we are saying. When we turn our heads to the left, it means, “I love you more than anything in the world.” And when we turn our heads to the right, it means, “Watch out, we’re in danger.” We had to be very careful in the beginning not to mix up “I love you more than anything in the world” with “Watch out, we’re in danger.”"

The film portrays the polar opposites of a society obsessed with partnering up. Love in this film isn't the fairy tale definition, wrapped up in destiny in fate, but simply a chemical state, and the joining of two people that have something in common. In this world you're allowed to have a relationship but you're not allowed to be in love.

It's utterly bizarre and there are some moments where I was fighting laughter; one in particular was a slowed down chase between an attendee at the hotel called The Lisping Man (John C Reilly) and a Loner. Another funny moment is one where the owner of the hotel (Olivia Coleman) is giving a short speech to a couple that have just paired up. "The course of your relationship will be monitored by our staff and by me personally." She says. "If you encounter any problems, any tensions, any arguing, that you cannot resolve yourselves, you will be assigned children. That usually helps, a lot." It's hard not to laugh every time she speaks since what she's saying is usually mental. Her and her husband are, as well as being in charge of the hotel, the hotel entertainment. They sing songs together and this provides a few laughs.

Character wise, the audience knows very little about the back stories of the pretty much all of them. All we know about David is that he has an ex-wife who left him for a man with contact lenses. We find out a little about the Limping Man (Ben Wishaw), as he says in AA meeting style in front of everyone at the hotel, "Hello everyone. My mother was left on her own when my father fell in love with a woman who was better at math than she was. She had a post graduate degree I think, where as my mother was only a graduate. I was nineteen at the time. My mother entered the hotel, but didn't make it and was turned into a wolf." Also the characters aren't played with much emotion. I found out that Lanthimos would tell the actors involved to just say their line rather than deliver it, which, if you're a well trained actor, must be pretty difficult to do. Farrell and Weisz hit the mark, though. I have seen both of them in other films that are beautifully acted so I know that they're not just type-casted bad actors, but that in fact they have done incredibly good jobs with their respective characters.

Aside from the strangeness of the film, it is beautifully shot. I found out thanks to google that the film was shot nearly entirely without make-up and without artificial lighting. It's also filmed in a beautiful place, too (County Kerry, Ireland (republic)). Stills from it make it look like a hipster indie film, akin to Submarine (dir. Richard Ayoade), and Juno (dir. Jason Reitman).

Needless to stay this film is probably going to be one that sticks with me for a while. Mainly just because I can never look at animals the same way ever again (and I even know about #piggate). I'd like to have tea with Yorgos Lanthimos and I'll probably buy other films of his. He calls The Lobster 'a rom-com like no other', and I think I agree.