Critics reviews

Like its namesake, The Lobster is so cold and spiky that it's pretty hard to love, and yet no final scene this year left me feeling as complex a mix of emotions as Lanthimos's finale... The ambiguity here isn't simply a matter of open-ended narrative gamesmanship, but the culmination of a movie that scuttles agilely and elusively between plausible pathology and stark, fable-like abstraction.

It's said The Lobster is "dystopian," "dark," "absurdist"—critical/zoological shorthand for a semi-endangered species of art film exotica of the Terry Gilliam variety. Superficially, it belongs to the family of surrealism, but Yorgos Lanthimos's style of rigorous dissociation is better seen as social ritualism. He contrives a stilted, communal, poisoned herd physicality that registers like the telegraphic choreography of silent film if it had been reverse engineered by behaviorist B.F. Skinner.

You don't require things in common to be in love. You don't need to be in love or out of love. You don't need to be with someone or without someone. You don't have to be married. It's OK to be alone. It's not OK to be alone, for some. Please consider this mordantly funny and heartbreaking allegory of the terrifying future.

I would gladly listen to Weisz read the audio book of a Muriel Spark novel, and maybe this film would have worked better as George Saunders–style literary fiction. Instead, The Lobster is a Jim Carrey movie stripped of comedy, with Colin Farrell in the Carrey role, an awkward everyman thrust into a sci-fi world resembling our own.

I had a great time at The Lobster and it also sort of made me want to kill myself. I am pretty sure this is the reaction the filmmakers were looking for... It's a satirical comedy—at times a very funny one, and other times the kind that makes you cover your eyes because what's happening onscreen is brutal, humiliating, or just unsettling in a way you can't quite place. Sometimes the movie is not funny at all and clearly isn't trying to be, and at several key moments it's deeply horrifying.

Both parts are so arresting and amusing that trying to work out real-world analogues for all of the nutty strictures and behavior is great fun, even if few are likely to come up with satisfying interpretations. If nothing else, The Lobster is endlessly creative, a quality in short supply these days.

Despite its singular qualities and unnerving tenor, The Lobster fails to inspire critique beyond surface level targets. In a world this muted and carefully subjugated, there's very little room for life's little mysteries to take root. Even the film's gruelingly stretched final scene, which contains multiple potential resolutions, feels numbingly pre-ordained. Stylistic cold-hearted rigor ends up denouncing any possibility for transcendence.

Lanthimos's lachrymose lament for a world centered on couples and a subworld centered on solitaires betrays a cranky, dyspeptic sense of sexual and romantic dysphoria, not a lament for the state of society or of the human condition but an airing of his own petty complaints. The infinitesimally mild satire of the hotel's blandly and dogmatically romantic pop culture is matched by the movie's ultimate benediction of—surprise, surprise—the redemptive power of true love.

Rather than present romance as a panacea, as so many other films do, The Lobster not only questions the value almost every society in the world places on procuring a mate but also rejects the notion that finding the One is the ultimate prize. Lanthimos forgoes easy sentiments about the transformative power of love; this may turn off some viewers, but there's a certain liberation and even some relief in knowing that societal pressure to settle down can be just as cruel as loneliness.

Colin Farrell gives one of his funniest and (strangely enough, considering the humorlessness of the character) charming performances since "In Bruges," as David. David is baffled, obedient, defeated. Watch his face as he listens to other people's "testimonies" at group events. There's not a hint of self-awareness there. He has zero sense of the absurd. David is a mushy lukewarm pudding of a man. With his mustache and pot belly and nondescript glasses, Farrell is a completely believable everyman.

A droll piece of work lashed with grim humor. For every moment that makes you laugh, there may be another that leaves you with your mouth hanging open. But Lanthimos poses some crazily poetic questions in The Lobster, particularly about what it means to ally yourself with another person. How much of yourself do you give up? What must you hold on to at all costs? And can you ever be sure you're not making the other person fit just so you won't be alone?

There's not the least whiff of bigger-budget compromise as the nightmare, Kafka by way of The Bachelor, plays out. Lanthimos has only seemed to double down on the type of lamely pathological interaction, almost calisthenic in its roteness, that's become his stock-in-trade.