The Lobster, film review: a new Farrell for a love story like no other

The Lobster is a European arthouse film par excellence – precisely the kind of project you can’t imagine ever being made in Hollywood. It has a Greek director (albeit one now based in the UK) and Irish, American and Dutch producers. Its actors are from all over the place. Its budget has been clawed together from innumerable different sources. This is an example of what used to be dismissed as a “Europudding” but it is also as rich and strange a film as you will see in a very long time – an absurdist tragi-comedy, performed in a very deadpan fashion.

In the first sequence of the film, we see an assassination… of a donkey. Early on, it is as if we are watching a cross between Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and an episode of Fawlty Towers. David (Colin Farrell), a repressed, paunchy and now single man, has checked into a hotel. His task here is to find a mate. He has a set number of days to do so. If he fails, he will be turned into an animal of his own choosing. (His preference is for lobsters because they live for more than 100 years and are blue-blooded.) David has a sheepdog as companion. “He’s my brother. He was here a couple of years ago but he didn’t make it,” he blithely explains.

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The setting is the near future but the hotel, which is moderately luxurious, has a distinct whiff of the 1970s about it. It is a drab and oppressive place. Guests sit nervously alongside one another at breakfast, barely speaking. The manager (Olivia Colman) is very brisk and bossy in a Prunella Scales-like way. At hotel social events, she performs old pop songs in a dirge-like fashion. All the guests seem to have their own peculiar ailments or disabilities. Characters lisp (John C Reilly) or limp (Ben Whishaw) or have violent nose bleeds (Jessica Barden). One of the daytime recreations is for the guests to head out into the forests to hunt down “loners”.

As the plot grows ever more far-fetched, the storytelling style remains grounded and understated. Farrell shows no emotion at all, whatever happens around him. There is the constant threat of violence. Guests who misbehave may be forced to put their hands into toasters or to wander around with boiled eggs under their armpits. “She jumped from the window of 180. There is blood and biscuits everywhere,” says one resident, reacting to a suicide as if someone has just spilled some food.

This absolute lack of emotion is contrasted with the solemn music and the tremulous, melodramatic voiceover from Rachel Weisz as the “short-sighted woman”. Her character doesn’t appear on screen until well into the film but she is heard throughout.

The screenplay, by the director, Yorgos Lanthimos, and his regular collaborator Efthimis Filippou, portrays a world in which anyone who is not in a couple is considered to be a pariah, on the level of an animal. Characters go to extreme lengths to prove their compatibility with potential mates. What they don’t convey in any way at all is pleasure in each other’s company or even sexual desire. They are all desperate to conform. The Maid (Ariane Labed, recently seen as the star of Fidelio, Alice’s Journey) is as much a coquette as she is a cleaner. Part of her job is to try to arouse the male guests. In one typically perverse scene, we see her testing out David’s virility. The camera cuts away to David’s dog, which looks as bored as he does.

What makes The Lobster such an unusual and original film is also what is most likely to discomfit audiences about it. Lanthimos’s directorial approach is enigmatic in the extreme. He never lets us know whether any given scene is intended to be comic, grotesque or sinister – or a mix of the three. He deliberately blurs the lines between farce, thriller and dystopian horror. His protagonists seem so detached that it is hard for us to feel very much for them, at least until the final reel, when Farrell’s character, besotted by Weisz’s myopic siren, finally begins to show some emotion.

Farrell’s performance as the oppressed, Pooterish everyman is well judged, and a world away from his usual macho star turns in movies such as Miami Vice or Alexander. As David, he has put on weight and has a chunky, unflattering, Lord Lucan-like moustache. In one excruciating scene, in which he tries to take off his trousers while wearing handcuffs, he shows unexpectedly Chaplinesque clowning skills. In his low-key way, he also hints at the yearning, jealousy and despair of the character.

In the second half of the film, the action moves away from the hotel to the surrounding woods, which are inhabited by anarchists and loners led by Léa Seydoux. Action sequences here are handled in a comic, surrealistic fashion which risks diminishing their impact.

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We are very aware of the references to other movies and plays. There are echoes here of everything from Ionesco to Luis Buñuel’s films and Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend, which likewise placed bourgeois characters in bizarre and horrific situations. The problem is that the layers of irony and the extreme stylisation get in the way of what eventually turns out to be a very primal love story.

The Lobster is a movie in which, arguably, far too much has been thrown into the pot. Even so, you can’t help but admire its director’s idiosyncratic brilliance. Every year, dozens and dozens of new films are made about love and relationships. Most follow exactly the same pattern. The French critic Raymond Bellour once described Hollywood films as machines to create couples. “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl,” is the formula repeated again and again in US movies. That’s why Lanthimos’ approach is so refreshing. His film is about couples, too, but it comes at its subject matter from an angle that no Hollywood film-maker would ever have dared taking.

Yorgos Lanthimos, 118 mins Starring: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Olivia Colman, Ashley Jensen, John C Reilly