For an intensely sad and cynical movie, The Lobster’s one good idea is awfully whimsical. It imagines a
dystopian parallel world much like our own, but which takes a dementedly strong
pro-marriage stance. All single people must find a mate; if they do not,
they’ll be turned into the animal of their choosing. When we meet sad-sack
Colin Farrell – he’s put on some weight to make his hangdog mood look extra
saggy – he’s just been dumped by his unseen wife, left to trudge to a singles’
resort with his brother, who had similar misfortune and is now a dog. It’s an
irresistible concept, and one sure to provoke good conversation and perhaps
some honest self-reflection. I think I’d be a house cat; they’ve all the
pampered benefits of dogs with none of the expectations of excitation. (And I
like napping in patches of sunshine.) Sadly, the movie’s not as playful as its
animating concept might lead one to believe.
When Farrell is asked what animal he’d want to be if, after
his allotted time to be unattached, he can’t find a suitable match, he has his
answer ready: a lobster. The hotel’s chipper manager (Olivia Colman) finds that
refreshing. Most people pick more popular animals. The fields around the hotel
feature the occasional rabbit, horse, camel, flamingo, and so on. I found
myself wondering who they might’ve been in an earlier life. That’s later,
though. First we must trudge through a stay in this sad hotel, where Farrell
meets friends like a dopey lisper (John C. Reilly) who would like to be a
parrot, and a fussy limper (Ben Whishaw) who’d rather not think about that
question thank you very much. There are also potential mates, like a shockingly
youthful nose-bleeder (Jessica Barden), an anxious biscuit-chomping lady (Ashley
Jensen), and a woman we learn has no feelings whatsoever (Angeliki Papoulia).
The film’s central premise is worked out with misanthropic
deadpan. Writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos, whose breakthrough feature was
2009’s memorable Dogtooth, an equally
imprisoned and methodical exploration of a locked-in system of perverse human
behavior, creates the hotel as the stifling inverse of a mischievous Wes
Anderson mood. It has a suffocating rigidity to Thimios Bakatakis’s static cinematography,
trapping its characters with either too much or not enough head space, squirming
with resigned discomfort like butterflies pinned behind glass while barely
alive, wriggling but clearly doomed. The patrons spend their days forced to
watch silently as staff acts out skits about the dangers of being alone, and
then they get death-marched into painfully stilted dances and awkward chitchat
around sad little meals. Once daily they’re driven out to the wilderness on a
hunt, told to use tranquilizer darts to shoot and collect loners who’ve escaped
the hotel pre-transformation and now live illegally in the woods. Each person
caught buys the hunter an extra day before the coupling deadline.
This is distancing movie, slow and repetitive as it watches
the sad desperate routines of its characters. A closed loop of behavior
operating under cruel impenetrable logic, the rigorous framing drains the
characters of agency. They’re trapped in a cruel world, explored by a cold
story. It’s tedious and increasingly pointless, wallowing in misery, dispassionately
nasty and mean. A dog is kicked to death. A woman is blinded. A man is forced
to stick his hand in a hot toaster. For a movie purporting to have cutting or
otherwise incisive ideas about relationships – the torture of loneliness, and
the desperation it can breed for finding One True Love – it’s too hollow,
forced, passionless. The actors speak uniformly in a flat affect, mumbling as
they talk past each other, glumly focused on their fate. There’s no energy to
their goals. They simply shrug and trudge, hunched over and preemptively
drained. Maybe they would be better
off as animals. Is that such a tragedy?
Lanthimos uses dreary colors to enhance the oppressive mood.
Stings of classical music mix with self-amused straight-faced absurdism. One
couple is dutifully celebrated in the hotel’s conference room, sent off to see
if the marriage will stick with the encouragement that if they have problems
they’ll be given children. “That usually helps,” the manager quips. We continue
on, counting down the days until Farrell will be made into a lobster. The movie
never progresses beyond the basics of its setup, with few complications,
escalations, or contradictions to keep things moving along. Instead it just
grinds on and on, a deadening effect rendering what starts as wry and shocking
merely numbing. Eventually one character flees the hotel and meets a variety of
characters hiding out in the woods – a group led by Léa Seydoux that includes
Rachel Weisz, who has also been narrating the whole thing in a largely emotionless
monotone. Alas, freedom of sorts is shot in the same stultifying icy precision
as the hotel, and slumps on for ages in a tiresome slog.
This is the sort of infuriating movie that slowly and
steadily drains all interest and inquisitiveness from a killer concept. At
first I was leaning in, eager to see an imaginative vision. By the time it lost
me, I found myself itching to leave, as one excruciating scene after the next
failed to build or move or provoke. It strands charismatic performers in a flat,
uninteresting style, punctuating long stretches of dead air with splashes of
cruelty and depression. It creates an interesting allegory and proceeds to take
care it almost never intersects with recognizable human emotions. It offers
only empty futility, distended bleak glibness hoping its heaviness and
pessimism get mistaken for profundity. What a waste. At one point a character
asks if she could watch Stand By Me,
and I wanted to go with her. Later, in the film’s final moments, a man prepares
to stab himself in the eyes with a steak knife. By that time I could almost relate.
