The Lobster

The Lobster
Film poster
Directed by	Yorgos Lanthimos
Produced by	Ceci Dempsey Ed Guiney Yorgos Lanthimos Lee Magiday
Written by	Efthymis Filippou Yorgos Lanthimos
Starring	Colin Farrell Rachel Weisz Jessica Barden Olivia Colman Ashley Jensen Ariane Labed Angeliki Papoulia John C. Reilly Léa Seydoux Michael Smiley Ben Whishaw
Music by	Johnnie Burn
Cinematography	Thimios Bakatakis
Edited by	Yorgos Mavropsaridis
Production company	Element Pictures Scarlet Films Faliro House Productions Haut et Court Lemming Film Film4 Productions
Distributed by	Feelgood Entertainment (Greece) Haut et Court (France) Element Pictures (Ireland) De Filmfreak (Netherlands) Picturehouse Entertainment (UK)
Release dates	15 May 2015 (2015-05-15) (Cannes) 16 October 2015 (2015-10-16) (United Kingdom & Ireland[1]) 22 October 2015 (2015-10-22) (Greece & Netherlands) 28 October 2015 (2015-10-28) (France)
Running time	118 minutes[2]
Country	Ireland United Kingdom Greece France Netherlands
Language	English French
Budget	€4 million ($4.5 million)[3]
Box office	$15.7 million[4]

The Lobster is a 2015 internationally co-produced absurdist dystopian comedy-drama^[5][6] film directed, co-written, and co-produced by Yorgos Lanthimos, co-produced by Ceci Dempsy, Ed Guiney, and Lee Magiday, and co-written by Efthymis Philippou. In the film's setting, singles are given 45 days to find a romantic partner or otherwise be turned into animals.^[7] It stars Colin Farrell as a newly-single man trying to find someone so he can remain human, and Rachel Weisz as a woman with whom he attempts to form a relationship. The film is co-produced by Ireland, United Kingdom, Greece, France and the Netherlands.

It was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and won the Jury Prize. It was shown in the Special Presentations section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.^[8]

Plot

David discovers that his wife has left him for another man, and is escorted to a hotel. The hotel manager reveals that singles have 45 days to find a partner, or they will be transformed into an animal; David's dog is his brother, for example. David chooses a lobster, due to their life cycle and his love of the sea. The hotel has many rules and rituals: masturbation is banned, but sexual stimulation by the hotel maid is mandatory, and guests attend dances and watch propaganda extolling advantages of partnership.

David makes acquaintances with a man with a lisp and a man with a limp, who become his quasi-friends. Limping man explains that he was injured in an attempt to reconnect with his mother, who had been transformed into a wolf. Lisping man is caught masturbating, and the hotel manager burns his fingers in a toaster. Relationships apparently require partners to have a distinguishing trait in common. Limping man is told a woman has arrived with a limp, but he says she limps from an injury that will heal and is not a suitable match. Limping man instead wins the affections of a woman with constant nosebleeds by purposely smashing his nose in secret. They move to the couples section to begin their month-trial partnership.

Residents can extend their deadline by tranquilizing single people in the forest; each captured "loner" earns them a day. On one such hunt, a woman with a fondness for biscuits offers David sexual favors, which he declines. She tells him that if she fails to find a mate, she will kill herself by jumping from a hotel window.

David later decides to court a notoriously cruel woman who has tranquilized more loners than anyone else. Their initial conversation is interrupted by the screams of the biscuit-loving woman, who has severely injured herself jumping from a window. Although troubled by the incident, David pretends to enjoy the woman's suffering to gain the heartless woman's interest. He later joins her in a jacuzzi, and she feigns choking; when he does not attempt help, she decides they are a match. The two have sex, and when David wakes up one morning after demonstrating signs of attachment, he finds she has kicked David's brother (in dog form) to death. When David cries in response, she concludes their relationship is a lie and drags him toward the hotel manager. He escapes capture and, with the help of a sympathetic maid, tranquilizes and transforms his partner into an unnamed animal.

Escaping the hotel, David joins the loners in the woods. In contrast, they forbid any romance, with mouth mutilation as punishment. David, who is nearsighted, begins a secret relationship with a nearsighted woman. They develop a gestural code for communication. They are taken on covert missions to the city, where their cover requires them to appear as lovers, which they secretly enjoy.

The loners launch a raid to sabotage the hotel's work. David reveals to the nosebleed woman that her partner has been faking, and he forces David to leave. Other loners hold the hotel manager and her husband at gunpoint, tricking him into shooting his wife to save himself, but the gun is not loaded, leaving the couple to face each other.

The leader finds the near-sighted woman's journal and discovers her plan to escape with David. The leader takes the woman to the city, ostensibly to have an operation to cure her near-sightedness, but blinds her. She tells David, who tries to find something else they have in common, but to no avail. He says they'll figure it out, and tells her to continue with their plan. Early the next morning, David overpowers and ties up the leader, ostensibly leaving her to be eaten by dogs. He and the blind woman escape to the city, stopping at a restaurant. Seeking to reestablish commonality, David goes to the restroom and prepares to blind himself with a steak knife. The blind woman waits at the table for him to return, and the film cuts to black.

Cast

Production

Principal photography began on 24 March 2014, and concluded on 9 May 2014.^[10] Filming took place in Dublin, Ireland, which represents "The City" in the film, and also at locations in and around County Kerry, including Sneem, Dromore Woods and Kenmare.^{[11][12][13][14]}

Marketing and distribution

In May 2014, it was announced that Sony Pictures acquired the distribution rights for Australia, New Zealand, German-speaking Europe, Scandinavia, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.^[15] A film still featuring Farrell, Whishaw, and Reilly was released around the same time.^[16] In May 2015, Alchemy acquired United States distribution rights; however, due to the company's financial struggles at the time, A24 acquired the US rights instead.^[17][18] Originally scheduled for an 11 March 2016 release, it was re-scheduled to 13 May 2016.^[19][20]

Reception

Critical response

The Lobster received acclaim from film critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a rating of 90% based on reviews from 182 critics, with an average score of 7.6/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "As strange as it is thrillingly ambitious, The Lobster is definitely an acquired taste – but for viewers with the fortitude to crack through Yorgos Lanthimos' offbeat sensibilities, it should prove a savory cinematic treat."^[21] At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 82, based on 44 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".^[22]

Oliver Lyttelton of The Playlist awarded the film an "A" grade and described it as "an atypically rich and substantial comedy" with "an uproarious yet deadpan satire concerning societal constructs, dating mores and power structures that also manages to be a surprisingly moving, gloriously weird love story." He concluded that the film was Lanthimos' "most accessible and purely enjoyable film yet".^[23] Chris Nashawaty of Entertainment Weekly gave a positive review and commended the film for being "visually stunning, narratively bold, and totally singular", adding that "it opens [one's] eyes to a new way of storytelling."^[24]

Guy Lodge, writing for Variety, called the film "a wickedly funny, unexpectedly moving satire of couple-fixated society", elaborating that Lanthimos' "confounding setup emerges as a brilliant allegory for the increasingly superficial systems of contemporary courtship, including the like-for-like algorithms of online dating sites and the hot-or-not snap judgments of Tinder."^[25]

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian rated the film three stars out of five, and wrote that The Lobster is "elegant and eccentric in Lanthimos’ familiar style", but "appears to run out of ideas at its mid-way point".^[26] IGN awarded it a score of 8.5 out of 10, saying "Colin Farrell heads up this surreal, hilarious and ultimately quite disturbing tale."^[27]

Wai Chee Dimock, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, called The Lobster a "fable of purgatory" and saw the ending not as "a romanticism finally let out of the bag, but a romanticism handicapped and disabled." She compared the film to the work of Samuel Beckett, saying that, for this all-Greek team, "absurdist theater is second nature, as it was second nature to the Irish Beckett a century ago."^[28]

Accolades

References

External links

• The Lobster at the Internet Movie Database
• The Lobster at AllMovie
• The Lobster at Box Office Mojo
• The Lobster at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Lobster at Metacritic