Day 306: Wednesday Reviews - The Lobster

Well, I've predictably found no time for this until now. I'm currently sat on the bed in my hotel room after a day working with Steve, dog-tired, aching, flecked with paint. But I've got a cup of Douwe Egberts instant coffee, a Chromebook on full charge, and an hour or so free in which to gather my thoughts about The Lobster.

I liked it! Yorgos Lanthimos' English language debut, starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, it was a surreal parable about dating and the strangling need to find a mate, told through the conceit of a near-future world in which anyone not in a relationship in The City is sent to a coastal hotel to spend 45 days attempting to pair with one of the other guests, after which time, if unsuccessful, they are turned into an animal. Singletons who refuse to comply run away to live in The Woods and dance alone to electronic music on portable Discmans (Discmen?), and are routinely hunted by hotel guests on excursions with dart rifles, who earn extra days at The Hotel for every singleton they capture.

Colin Farrell plays David, a podgy and taciturn middle-aged man recently broken up with, who must enter The Hotel along with his pet dog, who is actually his brother, who undertook and failed the programme a few years previously.

The animals don’t talk. They don’t have human features. They’re just animals. They’re not a major part of the narrative. Occasionally one wanders through a shot, looking non-plussed, disinterested.

As with The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Lanthimos blends the surreal and the real, the dreamlike and the mundane, in a way that draws out the former from the latter, and reminds you how the latter is always infused with the former. His tone can be Lynchian, at its best is even reminiscent of Kafka, but always is distinctly his own.

Dialogue is clipped, monotone, matter-of-fact. Shorn of their regular context, everyday objects and scenes become profoundly unsettling, the hotel corridors, the tangles of forest, the rows of discount store products in the City suddenly pointing not to their usual rich soup of meaning but standing only as themselves, objects of intense attention and uncanny creepiness. Echoes of Sartre’s nausea. In a way you can never place it all makes your skin crawl.

Yet it is funny, too. Uncanniness and humour can nestle so closely to one another, as with Lynch. Colin Farrell is hilarious in deadpan, but also lost and panicked and relatable, Lanthimos drawing depths out of him that we’ve seen before, but never as consistently. Rachel Weisz is good, too, as a forest loner to whom David is inexorably drawn. She also is here far more serious and honest than anything else I’ve seen her in, her face lined, her hair scraggly, the prim affectations of her late 90s period thankfully left far behind.

Her character is nearsighted. David also has trouble with his vision. This is important in the world of The Lobster. The potential validity of relationships is frequently measured by shared damage. Not just by authority figures but also by characters themselves. It matters to them that if, for example, they get nosebleeds, their partner also gets nosebleeds. They all tacitly understand this to be so.

There’s something childlike and naive about everyone here. As happens with its physical world, the distant tone separates behaviours and mores from the context in which we usually find them, showing them to be absurd and tragicomic. Desiring a partner to be broken in the ways in which you yourself are broken, or falling into petulant rage because of jealousy, or deciding to pretend to love someone for a lifetime rather than risk being alone - the patterns we play out in our heads day after day - here can be seen as ridiculous and fascinating, and unavoidable.

One more consequence of this measured detachment - I found the film to be shockingly violent. Lanthimos has an obsession with things-as-they-are, with looking at the world as a detached observer, and violence is an aspect of this. It is interesting and horrifying to Lanthimos’ lens that we are corporeal as well as mental, intangible beings, that we have physical biological form, and that we frequently enact violence and destruction upon the biological form of others.

Just as bottles of bleach, hotel corridors, trappings of ego become discrete subjects of attention, so too does violence. It is just there. We just see it. Take it in. And yet, without the cathartic role of surrounding emotion and context, we are denied the journey to process this violence, to understand it, deal with it, ultimately let it go. It stays there, stark, monolithic, terrible.

The Lobster is not a gratuitous or gory film, and yet in many places it made me squirm, churned my stomach, unsettled me on a visceral level.

It is, however, gorgeous. Dark and moody, with sumptuous, velvety textures and glassy black folds of water and the intricate play of shadow through trees, and filmed regularly in slow-motion, it provides a sensuality contrasting boldly with the deadpan emotional detachment of the tone.

Yet the film is not without its faults. As most critics have noted, it severely loses pace halfway through. The initial premise feels so full of potential, and yet it never really moves beyond this early promise, never develops out into much more than it first posits. Or, rather, the development falls back to being only an extrapolation of and investigation into the ramifications of the plot, a working through of the narrative tangle, rather than speaking to anything further and deeper in ourselves. The ending is exceptional, perfectly judged, but from the halfway point to these final scenes the film really sags, feeling drained of meaning. I think the worth of the thing is actually a story 45 minutes in length, and stretching it to two hours has left it thin in the middle.

Apart from this, however, it is a dazzling success. As an exploration of selfishness and self-sacrifice in romantic relationships, whether these two opposites are inherent in our natures, whether they are at odds, or compatible, it is perspicacious, troubling, and profound. As an impenetrable Kafkaesque vision rising from depths beyond logic and sense it is fittingly obscure. And as a piece of cinema it is mesmerising.