MAY 19, 2016
When someone asks you in “The Lobster” what animal you would like to be, it’s not a frivolous question. It is deadly serious.
“The Lobster” has easily the most fascinating premise of any movie I’ve seen this year. It’s a satiric/horror/sci-fi parable that won the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and is now reaching U.S. theaters. And you’ve never seen anything like it.
David (Colin Farrell) lives in a society where being a couple is paramount. When his wife leaves him for another man, David, a shy architect, finds himself suddenly single and is rounded up by the government, as is any single person of an adult age who is not part of a couple. He is taken to The Hotel, a grandiose palace where he is given 45 days to find the love of his life. Should he fail to fall in love, he will be surgically transformed into the animal of his choice, where he would have a second chance to find love.
Should he not make it, David chooses to become a lobster, reasoning that lobsters live for over a hundred years, they’re blue-blooded (like aristocrats), and they stay fertile all their lives. Hard to argue with that, although you may just as easily wind up on a plate next to a dish of drawn butter.
David checks into The Hotel with his trusty dog, who is actually his older brother who failed to make it at The Hotel several years earlier. Each morning, David is called to breakfast with an announcement of just how many days he has left. Looking around at his fellow hotel guests, he can see why none of them have found love — there’s something just a bit off about each of them. David soon bonds with two of them — Limping Man (Ben Whishaw) and Lisping Man (John C. Reilly), both of whom are desperate for love but have no social skills whatsoever to make that happen. (Tellingly, David is the only character in the film who is given a name.)
Each evening, the residents of The Hotel are given tranquilizer guns and taken by van to a nearby forest where the renegade Loners (i.e. single people) live. For every Loner they tranquilize and bring back to The Hotel, they get one extra day’s reprieve.
Desperate to find a mate as his clock ticks down to his final few days, David tries to hook up with stone-cold Heartless Woman (Angeliki Papoulia), but their union has tragic results, and shaken, he escapes from The Hotel and flees to the forest, where he is taken in by the Loners, commanded by imposing Loner Leader (French actress Léa Seydoux). David soon finds that the Loners have rules just as strict as he found in The Hotel. Loners must remain single, and any couples found will be dealt with harshly.
It is just then when David lays eyes on Short Sighted Woman (a radiant Rachel Weisz), and he is smitten. Just as he as found the woman for whom he has been searching, it is in a place where it is forbidden to fall in love with her. What to do?
“The Lobster” is the creation of Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, who co-wrote the script with Efthimis Filippou. Like him or not (and critically he is a very polarizing director), Lanthimos probably best known to the art-house crowd for his 2010 Greek film “Dogtooth,” which (trust me on this) is the absolutely weirdest movie ever to be nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar. But he has displayed a creatively wild imagination that is uniquely his.
For example, the details of the world of The Hotel are so thoroughly absurd yet completely thought-through that you keep wondering throughout the film “What could be next?” It also helps that the first hour is almost completely confined to The Hotel, which helps to create an atmosphere of claustrophobia and the feeling that there’s no escape as your clock ticks down.
When the action moves to the forest, the blackly-comic tension of the first hour is somewhat dissipated, and the pace begins to lag slightly as the film becomes a conventional (if slightly bizarre) romance. But the satiric edge is not entirely absent. As David and his new love converse in the foreground, a flamingo walks behind them in the background, followed by a camel. You can’t help but laugh, but then you remember that these were once real people, and the laughter sticks a bit in your throat.
In a film with such bone-dry humor, Lanthimos’ cast is up to the task. Whishaw and Reilly manage to show their characters’ desperation while still being funny, Seydoux is a convincing Loner Leader, and Weisz, who can do no wrong in my book, will break your heart in this, particularly after a late plot-twist that only deepens her character.
But “The Lobster” is Farrell’s film from beginning to end. Usually the most dynamic of actors (his jittery hitman in “In Bruges” remains one of my favorites), he is thoroughly committed to this part, having to tamp down his usual energy to create a milquetoast pushover, who is dazed by the situation in which he finds himself and realizes only slowly that he has to do something to change it. It’s Farrell’s best performance in years.
Even if your mind begins to wander a bit in the second hour (a little tightening wouldn’t have hurt), it is a treat to see a film so crammed with original ideas, even if they don’t all work. It may not be to your taste, but there’s no doubting that “The Lobster” is one of a kind.
GRADE: B+
