Review: "The Lobster"

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.