The lobster yorgos lanthimos movie#

At some level, the movie recognizes both our desire for relationship and our need for it. Early signs the movie might head this way are the occasions in which we watch David, alone in his room, struggling to apply pain-relief ointment on a hard-to-reach part of his back. So The Lobster backs off a bit from its bitterly comic, anti-romantic first half. David encounters this group via a plot development I wonвЂ™t reveal, and though they offer protection from the hotel, their approach to human relationship isnвЂ™t much more appealing - especially after he begins to fall for a beguiling loner known as the Short Sighted Woman (Rachel Weisz). David admires her, and begins to wonder if they might be match.ДЄ different sort of absurdity takes place in the forest, where peacocks and camels occasionally wander by (former hotel guests, presumably) and a band of these loners have set up a feral community in which romantic relationships are strictly forbidden. With each loner that a guest bags, they get to add a day to their stay. The hotel conducts periodic hunts in the nearby woods, where the hotel guests track down вЂњlonersвЂќ (runaway singles), tranquilize them and bring them back to the hotel to be turned into animals. Known as the вЂњHeartless WomanвЂќ (Angeliki Papoulia, who also starred in Alps and Dogtooth), she refuses to find a partner, but manages to stave off her transformation via a loophole. One of these women tries to subvert the hotelвЂ™s rules. In their matching floral print dresses, the women look like Stepford wives, fresh off the assembly line. At the enforced ball, chairs are lined up on opposite sides of the dance floor like battalions ready to engage in warfare.

The hotelвЂ™s dining room is aligned with rows of tables for one.

Every image is neatly arranged and organized. Lanthimos, true to the laboratory nature of his narratives, is a compositional clinician. The humor falls somewhere between deadpan and absurdist. David glances to the side and then answers, вЂњHeterosexual.вЂќ (Nothing вЂњin between,вЂќ such as bisexuality or even half sizes for shoes, is allowed.) He pauses for a moment, mumbling something about a homosexual experience in college, when we hear the clicking of high heels off screen. Checking into the hotel, David is asked whether he wants to register as heterosexual or homosexual. In many ways, The Lobster is the funniest of LanthimosвЂ™ most recent films.ДЄnother humorous moment - and a throwaway one - reveals how precisely conceived the picture is. With no one at the table to help him, he вЂњdies.вЂќ ItвЂ™s like watching a lobotomized Saturday Night Live sketch. In one, a man eating alone pretends to choke on his food. (Much of The Lobster recalls the work of cinematic surrealist Luis BuГ±uel.) Part of the hotelвЂ™s indoctrination regarding the merits of coupledom are ridiculous skits miming the dangers of being single. Reilly and Ben Whishaw play fellow hotel guests, and their ridiculous conversations about their animal choices, had in robotic monotones, have a hint of comic surrealism. The humor, and there is plenty, falls somewhere between deadpan and absurdist. Masturbation, perhaps the purest expression of a solitary existence, is forbidden. Attendance at a creepily joyless dance (a Lanthimos specialty) is mandatory.

All the men must wear the same shirt and pants, while all the women wear the same dress. Nerdy, soft-spoken and cloyingly polite, David - along with everyone else - easily acquiesces to the strict rules of the hotel (overseen by a solidly united couple, of course). This is the situation facing a recently divorced architect named David (a dryly funny Colin Farrell). If they fail, they will be turned into an animal of their choosing. And so those who find themselves without a partner - by way of divorce or death or some other reason - check in at a hotel with other singles, where they have 45 days to find a companion. In the world of The Lobster, it is apparently illegal to be single. Yet the stranger things get, the more their behavior and motivations look uncomfortably familiar. In each of those movies, we observe characters operating in a deranged and highly unrealistic scenario. This is another work of social-experiment cinema from writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos ( Dogtooth, Alps). If weвЂ™ve come to idolize marriage in contemporary Western society, The Lobster has come to desecrate it.

The lobster yorgos lanthimos