/ The Lobster / film analysis

From the film director Yorgos Lanthimos, famous for his Oscar-nominated “Dogtooth”, comes his first English-language film Lobster, and the critics described it as ‘’Anti-rom-com, with teeth’’.
Lathimos wrote it with his long time screenwriter Efithimis Filippou, and the main cast is given to Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz. If you’re thinking that the big star cast affected Lathimos avant-garde approach you’re deadly wrong, it’s weird and heartbreaking hilarious.

It tells a story of a dystopian world where single people are moved to a Hotel, and given 45 days to find true love, or else they are turned into the animal of their choice and released into the woods where they are literally hunted down by other unattached prisoners of the Hotel.
The Lobster imagines a time when being single is a crime, and plays with the idea that monogamous relationships are what distinguish us from beasts.

Colin Farrell plays David, man who has been left by his wife, and therefore because he is ‘’single’’ he winds up in the Hotel, where hotel manager reveals him that single people have 45 days to find a partner, or they will be transformed into an animal. When he is asked "Now, have you thought of what animal you'd like to be if you end up alone?", David replies ‘’Lobster, because lobsters can live for over 100 years, are blue-blooded like aristocrats, and stay fertile all their lives." (most people (like David's brother) choose dogs, which has led to canine overpopulation.)

The hotel has strict rules: Homosexuals are tolerated, bisexuals are not. If any resident of the hotel is caught masturbating they will be publicly shamed and forced to put their hands in a toaster. Individuality is strongly discouraged.
In his first day in the Hotel David has one hand handcuffed behind his back to show how life is easier “when there are two of something rather than just one”.
It’s interesting that except for David, none of the other characters in the film has a name, they are called, for example ‘’the heartless, cruel woman’’, ‘’ the man who limps’’, ‘’the woman prone to nosebleeds’’ etc. Reducing people to a single attribute.

After a failed attempt to connect with a heartless woman, David escapes to the woods to join the loners, where he meets Short Sighted Woman (Rachel Weisz) and falls in love with her,
but ‘’The Loners’’ leader enforces similarly restrictive rules, oppression in the other extremism- true love is forbidden. So they have to hide their love and develop a complicated language of hand signals.

On the other hand, with cinematography, Lathimos took a different approach, where camera is nothing but a distant observer of what is going on rather than a participant.
It was shot using natural light and no filtering or in-camera effects, and actors had no make-up.
Lathimos said about the cinematography:
‘’So this film, for me, was mainly about having a certain kind of voyeuristic look to it. We decided to just try and keep the camera as much as away from the actors as possible and not have it in their face. Usually we had the camera either lower or higher than their eye lines. We used long lenses, and a few times very wide-angle lenses—extreme choices. We created a visual language that we felt was particular to this film.
At the same time, I think that because we are the same people, there are many similarities. I do have a very particular taste and sensibility about how I like my films framed, the rhythm, and the kind of coverage that I do, which I don’t want to be extensive. I want to focus on certain aspects of a scene and create a certain tone. We made this film taking all that into consideration.’’

Here’s one part of the review from ‘’Filmicon’’ that masterfully sums up the film:

''In the era of franchise films, like The Hunger Games or the Twilight series, and of so many other industrial visual commodities, the Lobster undermines the complacency and the conformism of escapist sagas in artificial paradises. Its bleak dystopia “unhouses” the viewer by presenting the dominated world of everyday familiarity as the locus of a frightening hidden forces that suffocate the mind and indeed annihilate the body. The story about a retreat hotel in which failed lovers try to form affairs that would save them from being transformed into animals is a unique and somehow an impressive concept. The two main heroes form an unexpected bond (Love? Despair? Survival Instinct?) which brings a catalytic interruption of normality: T.S. Eliot talked about “Who then devised the torment? Love. / Love is the unfamiliar name…” The unfamiliarity of love becomes the ground for all awkwardness and quirkiness that dominate the artificiality of acting and the unnaturalness of verbal communication. Bertolt Brecht’s defamiliarization technique appears to undermine the traditional function of affective images for empathic identification with the heroes. Love confronts the usual romanticism of emotions with the cruelty of an invisible society which imposes conformity and homogeneity. Yet at the same time, love as an affective bond becomes the strategy for such homogeneity: It becomes the coercive mechanism for eliminating individuality. As Francine Prose observed: “Dipping into the past to borrow from Greek tragedy, picturing the future as a surreal and horrific exaggeration of the present, The Lobster frightens and entertains, saddens and inspirits us – in this case with a final vision of self-sacrifice and devotion that ultimately transcends society’s attempts to commodify and regulate the mystery of love.”