The Lobster [Blu-ray + Digital HD]

The film opens with thirtysomething David (Colin Farrell)—Kafka's Joseph K.’s screen double—being left by his wife for another man and subsequently taken to a fancy seaside resort. As David is subjected to peculiar check-in rituals (registration of his sexual orientation and confiscation of his personal belongings), it becomes clear that this is no ordinary Holiday Inn but a severely administered open prison. The hotel management compels its single guests to find mates during their short stay, or else be transformed into animals. David chooses to become a lobster if he doesn’t succeed: “Lobsters live over a hundred years and stay fertile all their lives,” he explains. For Lanthimos, this is not a random choice of beast: his lethargic protagonist is like a crustacean struggling to survive in rough waters.The hotel epitomizes the modern disciplinary institution, operating simultaneously as school, asylum, and hospital. Daily theatrical demonstrations in a ballroom extol the benefits of marital life to the guests, while physical experiments hinder sexual fulfillment. Navigating this dreadful routine, David encounters law and punishment, and even public torture: a lisping man (John C. Reilly) is burnt with a toaster in the middle of the cafeteria because he has repeatedly engaged in masturbation in his room. Some guests resort to lying and hide behind make-believe relationships to save their skins. David briefly adopts this strategy but, after a traumatic experience, flees into the woods where he begins to live among the Loners, a group of anarchic fugitives opposed to sex and love.Survival instincts catapult David from a community that forcibly injects emotion to another that banishes it and numbs the individual. Though their principles are at odds with each other—one is a capitalist institution that marginalizes loneliness while the other is a civic society that promotes it—their tactics are similarly despotic and both inflict atrocious punishments upon disobedient members. In each case, the only thing that’s permissible is conversation. And it is by striking up a few conversations with David that one elegant Loner (Rachel Weisz, who also delivers the film’s voiceover) steals his heart away.In this half-mythical, half-surrealistic portrait of an innocent Everyman’s confrontation with a cold-blooded system, Lanthimos achieves a level of audience identification that his previous films had failed to bring about. Alternating between melancholic and aggressive string compositions by Beethoven and Shostakovich respectively, he conveys David’s turbulent inner life and his growing sense of helplessness against power structures that want to strip him of his humanity. Lanthimos’s mise en scène is vibrant, meticulous, unsentimental, and effective.That unsentimental quality can also alienate the viewer; in the end, David remains as much a stranger to us as he does to himself and his lover. Crushed by the violently tragic predicament in which his would-be companion finds herself, he retreats to his existential bubble and becomes ghostly, un-readable, and almost devoid of emotion. Lanthimos leaves us with a feeling of cosmic loneliness, and the idea that, even between lovers, there are insurmountable rifts—a void that can never be filled.Blu-ray has good "making of" features (cast and crew) and audio commentary track.

I wanted to like it. The dry humor and all but it honestly wasn't funny. Not even in a dark humor/dry/or bleak distopian sort of way. I could see how the movie could have been good, if they had come out of the monotone expressionless blank personalities, but it just didn't work.I think it's funny how many reviewers on here giving 5 stars seem to think the rest of us are too unintelligent to "understand" the humor in the movie and why its supposedly so funny.No, we get it. We get that we are supposed to "get it." It just wasn't even darkly amusing. It was droll and boring. I kept waiting for it to change but it never came out of its bland moroseness. There are plenty of movies that are bleak and dark. The road, Children of men, as well as series like TWD and GOT that are extremely bleak and dark but they also work. There are also movies that are supposed to feel hopeless, but we end up feeling for the characters. Pick any zombie or end of the world movie. Society under control after the end of the world movie.So the point of the movie is supposed to be that everyone is going along with the forced hotel stays, finding a mate or death. Hunting each other down for extra days with no question. Believing they are going to be changed into animals without questioning it. Everyone is just letting the hotel owners decide their fate and it seems to be privatized but also something that everyone is collectively going along with.Then, when Colin escapes, he ends up with the "free people" who aren't actually free, The loners who aren't actually alone. But instead of being free, there is another leader and set of rules and the whole thing is hardly any better than the city/hotel system.And still, no one questions it. Everyone follows along with the rules no matter how wrong they are. Rachel Weitz charcter allows the leader to force her into a surgery she doesn't actually want, which then blinds her. Even when the two main characters are finally free (a second time) from the loners, we still see Colin and Rachel, so subservient to and brainwashed with the idea that a mate has to share the same defining characteristic that he goes into the toilet to gouge his own eyes out with a knife in order to be a match for Rachel's newly blind character.(I am aware that a lot of the fans of this movie think that that is the point we are all not "getting") But my point is, why call this a dark comedy when it isn't? Why not go for another genre and not leave the people who are watching it looking for a dark comedy but feeling like they've just had two hours of their lives hijacked? And even for those who didn't watch it all... to put that dog scene in there and just spring that image on all of us was actually a cruel and disturbing thing to do.Yeah I get it. That's supposed to be the joke. The jokes on us -the masses too stupid to "get" the movie. The ones that I guess the director assumes need to be shook and woken from our mainstream dull and boring lives? I think the jokes actually on anyone narcissistic and bloated full enough of their own ego enough to actually make that assumption, when the reality of the situation is that the movie sucks.

The Lobster is an idiosyncratic, quirky, unconventional view of a sexual dystopia. The premise is that in a undefined future people find partners at a resort where, if they do not find a partner within a specific time, they turn into an animal of their choice. They are then released to the forest where they are hunted like any other animal.What follows is not a spoiler, because more than anything else, this movie is an experience, albeit a moody one.This movie is a terrific downer. There is a constant overcast in outside scenes (it was filmed in Ireland). The emotional aspect of meeting, finding, or courting a partner is completely absent. Sex with the maids are mandatory and is performed like a factory production line. There is no joy of sex. There is no excitement of expectation at dances. Every aspect of finding a partner is considered a chore, with a constant realization that if one is not found — ironically, the resort must consider the partnering to be “genuine” — you are going to be turned into an animal, hunted and killed. Colin Farrell’s introduction to the resort resembles being inducted into the army. It is no future I would want to be a part of.Still, every aspect of this movie is terrific. The acting, direction and every other aspect of the movie is masterful. The supporting roles are strong. John C. Reilly, especially, is good. This cannot be considered a “feel good” movie — because it definitely will NOT. This movie will not cheer you up. It will, however, make you feel grateful that you are living, for all its faults, in present times and not in the future depicted in the film.