Movie review: The Lobster shows its claws

By Jay Stone

Good luck with The Lobster, Yorgos Lanthimos’s bizarre satire of romance, or at least of what he supposes to be the world’s idea of romance. It goes like this: people in this alternate universe — Lanthimos, for newcomers to this kind of art-house dystopia, dwells in a world of fractured realities — must be in a relationship. If they are not, they have 45 days to find a mate. After that, they are turned into animals, which seems cruel, but they do get to choose the animals.

The hero of the film, a sad architect named Dave (Colin Ferrell, in perhaps the most hopeless moustache since Groucho) has been dumped by his wife and has decided that if he can’t find a replacement, he will be a lobster, because they live 100 years and he has always liked the sea. He doesn’t think much about the eventuality of hot water, but sure enough, he gets into a lot of it.

The Lobster, like the crustacean itself, is delivered in segments. The first half takes place in a seaside hotel, a place of eerie and deadpan strangeness where the inmates are forbidden to masturbate, which puts quite a crimp in the unmarried life. There Dave submits to the kind of enslavement you imagine might take place on a cruise ship run by socially inept members of a surreal service club. For instance, there are dances where an amusingly unattractive pair of singers serenades a roomful desperate single people who are being brainwashed into committing themselves to find a mate: imagine a 1950s Rotary party being run by a Jewish mother, with everyone dragging themselves around a dance floor in doleful box step.

People explain their “defining characteristics” and try to find a match. Dave makes two friends: a guy with a limp (Ben Whishaw) and a guy with a lisp (John C. Reilly). The guy with a limp sets his sights on a woman whose nose bleeds all the time, and courts her by secretly cutting his nose so it will bleed as well. They are soon engaged, and perhaps successful marriages have been made out of less.

The residents don’t get out much, needless to say, but their main recreation is loading up a rifle with tranquilizer darts and heading into the woods to capture rebellious single people who live there: the wild unwed.

In part 2 of The Lobster, Dave escapes from the hotel and goes to live among them. They are organized by Lea Seydoux, a fearsome dictator who has her own anti-sex rules: people caught flirting have their mouths carved open. But Dave can’t help falling in love with a beautiful and lonely woman (Rachel Weisz) who is also the narrator of the film. Together they form a secret language and have stilted, comically everyday conversations while, in the background, a menagerie of odd animals — the camel is an especially jarring sight — walk around, a permanent reminder of what has happened to those who didn’t mate in part 1.

Laugh? I thought I’d never start.

Like all dedicated surrealists, Lanthimos approaches his material with a matter-of-fact naturalism. It’s a style that cuts both ways, underlining the humor and blackening the fear. If you saw his Oscar-nominated 2009 film Dogtooth (three teenagers are held in captive isolation by over-protective parents) you know the creepy feeling of imminent and unpredictable violence that hangs over his movies.

Indeed, bafflement and dread are the driving forces in The Lobster; the motiving idea — that society demands that people pair up — isn’t developed very far, and the notion of a great love at the centre of the action is unpersuasive. However, Ferrell is fun to watch as a man who is entirely uninteresting (his defining characteristic is that he is short-sighted and at the beginning, presumably talking to his unfaithful wife, he asks, “Did he wear glasses or contact lenses?”) and Weisz evokes some sympathy as a lost soul.

It’s also a chance to catch up with a filmmaker of original and probably brilliant vision, here making his English-language debut. The movie won the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes film festival, where it rightly belongs. It’s a movie to see if you’ve seen everything else.

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