Lanthimos, Yorgos, “The
Lobster”, Limp Films, et.al., 2015.
This is horrible.
It’s not strictly
horror, although horrific things take place within it. It’s
discussed loosely as a dystopian science-fiction piece, but that
doesn’t sit right either. It feels more like an Absurdist work, or
a magical-realist movie. The only thing that I can say definitively
about it is that it is just nasty.
By way of a caveat
before getting into the guts of it, it’s a movie in which terrible,
appalling things happen to animals and, given my attitude towards
such fare, you know I’ll be marking it down as a result. Doing my
research post viewing I discovered that the director has a track
record for depictions of animal cruelty and I doubt I would have gone
to see this film if I’d known ahead of time. I feel kind of queasy
now, having contributed anything to this monster’s career. Still,
maybe I can now warn people to stay away.
To put this into some
kind of perspective – lest you think I’m just being precious –
in the opening scene of this film, a woman drives a car through the
rain until she arrives at a field, draws out a pistol and guns down a
donkey who doesn’t understand anything about what is going on until
it’s too late. We are left to ponder this scene and no concrete
answers as to why it appears are provided to us, the audience,
despite the remainder of the film. In fact, the action and the woman
have no relevance to anything that comes afterwards. The only thing
that, in retrospect, this scene tells us is that women and animals
are going to be harshly dealt with, on the one hand, and negatively
portrayed, on the other, in what comes next.
Let me be clear: I am
fully aware that, in some countries and cultures in the world,
donkeys are eaten by people. However, just as I would be appalled to
witness the actual death of a human being screened for my
entertainment, I am equally disgusted that anyone would film an
animal’s cruel and pointless killing and call it “art”. It
isn’t. It’s pornography of a low and sadistic order. This is the
leitmotif for the rest of this dubious work.
The story of the film
concerns “Dave”, played by Colin Farrell, who enters a hotel to
stay. After being intensively grilled and divested of his clothing
and personal effects, he is told that he must find a partner within
the next 45 days or suffer being turned into an animal. When asked
what type of animal he would like to be transformed into, he decides
that he would like to become a lobster. Thus, the film’s title.
The rest of the film’s
first half follows Dave’s progress: he meets two other men seeking
companionship and they observe the women who have arrived for the
same purpose. There are events which throw the two groups awkwardly
together and we hear a lot about the men and their tactics for
passing the 45 days untransformed. The individuals in the Hotel are
made to focus on what makes them unique and to look for that in
others; unfortunately, they focus on things like lisps, or limps, or
a tendency towards sudden nose-bleeds, rather than the qualities of
their personalities. One young woman becomes a Shetland pony because
no-one else has hair quite as nice as she does. The film is delivered
in such a deadpan, Monty Python-esque fashion that I couldn’t make
up my mind if these people were simply stupid, or if the director was
in earnest.
Of the three men upon
whom we’re made to focus, Dave has no overtly defining feature
apart from his myopia. He has checked in with his brother who was
transformed into a Border Collie during his previous stay but
who is restricted to Dave’s room. None of the women present wear
glasses or have animal companions so it seems that Dave is at a
disadvantage. Of his two buddies, one (Ben Wishaw) has a limp and
initially pursues a woman with a similar disadvantage until he works
out that she only has a minor sprain. He therefore periodically fakes
a bloody nose in order to win the favour of the young woman with this
affliction and so fakes his way into passing the Hotel’s regime
unscathed. John C. Reilly’s sad-sack character, the one with the
lisp, is doomed to fail (he chooses, it is pointed out ironically, to
become a parrot).
One way that the Hotel
guests can prolong their stay is by participating in the nightly
hunts, where, armed with tranquiliser dart guns, they pursue
forest-dwelling “Loners” – people un-partnered and therefore
barred from society – gaining a day’s reprieve for every sleeping
Loner they bring back with them. One of the women – identified as
“heartless” – takes inordinate pleasure in these events,
brutally bashing and clubbing her tranquilised prey. Dave decides
that he can also fake his way into couplehood by feigning a cold
sociopathy the equivalent of hers. This he tries to do, until the
morning he awakens to find that she has methodically kicked his
brother to death in their bathroom: his inability to react
unemotionally to this horrible moment sees them fighting together,
she to expose his lies to the authorities, he to silence her before
she blows the whistle. He eventually succeeds, by throwing her into
the Transformation Room where she is turned into ... we are not told
what, but it’s implied to be something horrible.
Here, the film loses its
way. To avoid being exposed, Dave runs off into the forest and joins
the Loners. We start from scratch learning about a new community and
the rules which govern them. The leader of the Loners (Léa Seydoux)
is petulant and scheming: she denies the Loners any attempts at
pairing up, scarring and terrorising them for flirting, or kissing.
Nevertheless, Dave encounters a short-sighted woman (Rachel Weisz) who responds
affectionately to his presence. They battle uncertainty and jealousy
to finally embark upon a relationship under the suspicious gaze of
the Leader. Eventually, she discovers them and takes the woman into
the City to have her blinded by an ophthalmic surgeon (!). Now that
they have nothing more in common – he is still short-sighted, but
she is now blind – the assumption is that they will drift apart.
Again, I was bewildered: was the director being literal with this
stuff? Or was it some kind of bizarre – and simplistic –
metaphor?
The lovers decide instead
to make a break and head for the sterile City where their status as
couple will ensure their safety. They wind up at a diner where they
agree that, in order to have something in common, Dave will blind
himself with a steak knife so that they can continue on together. He
doesn’t do this and abandons her. And that’s it.
This is a poisonous piece
of work. The women involved are universally derided and misused,
transformed against their will, forced to beg and whine for what they
want, depicted as malicious, manipulative and spiteful, and, in the
end, cast off as unnecessary. When the men enter the Hotel they are
all dressed in dark trousers, white, or blue, button-down shirts, and
blue blazers; the women are all dressed in the same provocative
halter-neck dress. In other words, the men are all anonymized, while
the women are all objectified. One woman begs Dave to couple-up with
her, at first offering treats to his dog, then offering him sexual
favours which he rebuffs: she threatens, and then succeeds, in
throwing herself out of a window in despair. The youngest two women –
best school friends – arrive together, then abandon each other in
the struggle to “win”, and a bitchy break-up is all that is left
of their camaraderie.
(On a side note, when did
it become a thing that men desire, above all else, the possibility to
sodomize other people? I’ve seen it in a bunch of films lately
where women offer anal sex to men in return for advantage. The
“Kingsmen” movie – despite its many, many flaws - was
distinctly ruined for me in this regard, and this present movie also
raised the issue. Frankly I don’t care what people get up to with
each other, but this was a step too far. I would suggest that Yorgo
Lanthimos simply gets off on women with posh British accents saying
“fuck” and “arse” in the same sentence...)
On the other hand, the
men all pal around, discussing and employing tactics in a bumptious,
nerdy fashion, succeeding to various degrees before having the rug
pulled out from underneath them. Amid the - at all times - dead-pan
delivery of the film, the men are treated as innocent fools, bumbling
their way around, while the women are all calculating and
pre-meditated, built along the lines of Disney’s Cruella de Ville.
There’s a hatefulness beneath the surface of this piece that
undermines any attempt at gentle humour that the director seems to be
heading for. In fact, I saw the trailer for this movie before seeing
it and that document implied that this was going to be a quirky,
off-kilter romantic comedy – there was no hint of the nihilism and
venom to come.
I’ve read other reviews
of this film in the meantime and many of them use words like
“visionary”, “challenging” and “thought-provoking”. Don’t
be fooled by the cine-files: this is a poisonous, unreconstructed,
anti-feminist, hymn to the patriarchy, wrapped up in as many murdered
animals as the director thought he could get away with. The presence
of a percentage of the cast of “Spectre” and a handful of
Academy Award winners and nominees should not influence your decision
to see this; rather, it should make you wonder what on Earth they
were thinking.
Avoid at all costs.
Zero Tentacled Horrors.
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