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Movie review: The Lobster takes a strange look at falling in love in the 21st century

Vancouver Sun 

Movie review: The Lobster takes a strange look at falling in love in the 21st century

Irish actor Colin Farrell talks during a press conference for the film "The Lobster" at the 68th Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southeastern France, on May 15, 2015.

LOIC VENANCE / Vancouver Sun
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The Lobster

Rating: *** 

Starring: Cast: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Lea Seydoux, John C. Reilly

Directed by: Yorgos Lanthimos

Duration: 118 minutes

Welcome to the near future, where being single will not be tolerated.

Whether it’s divorce or death that leaves you solo is not the issue. You must go to the processing hotel where you will have 45 days to find a new mate.

Those who are not successful at pairing up after the allotted time can expect to be transformed into the animal of their choice. And released into the forest.

That’s the game plan in The Lobster, filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’ absurdist fable about falling in love in the 21st century. The Lobster stars Colin Farrell — not that you’d recognize him here — as David, a sad sack guy at the end of a relationship. David must go to the hotel to seek out a new partner, and there he learns the tough rules about finding a new mate.

Should he fail, asks the hotel manager (Olivia Colman), does he have any thoughts about what sort of animal he’d like to be?

The very crustacean of the title, of course.

At the hotel, other guests (played by John C. Reilly, Ben Whishaw and Angeliki Papoulia, among others) strive to find a partner. They appear willing to try anything.

Meanwhile, outside the hotel walls, a renegade group known as loners runs wild in the forest. These are escapees from the new relationship order; they lead celibate lives under the direction of their tough-minded leader (Lea Seydoux).

David eventually becomes one of the loners, and then romance enters his life in the person of a short-sighted woman (Rachel Weisz). Too bad the rules on the renegade side turn out to be just as restrictive as the ones on the partner side.

What does it all mean?

We gave up wondering after the first surreal, blackly funny (up to a point) hour. The Lobster initially seems weird and wonderful, a clever, deadpan look at contemporary courtship and the lengths people go to fit into social norms, but for this viewer the whole thing ran out of steam halfway through. A general flat affect, mirrored in visuals and performance, eventually stopped being funny.

Fans of Lanthimos’ work (Alps; Dogtooth) will welcome the director’s first English language movie, once again co-written with Efthymis Filippou.

2016-03-25T03:00:00-05:00

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