The Lobster

Plot

David (Colin Farrell) is escorted to a hotel after his wife has left him for another man. The hotel manager reveals that single people have 45 days to find a partner, or they will be transformed into an animal; the dog accompanying David is his brother. David chooses to become a lobster, due to their life cycle and his love of the sea. David makes acquaintances with Robert, a man with a lisp, and John, a man with a limp, who become his quasi-friends. John explains that he was injured in an attempt to reconnect with his mother, who had been transformed into a wolf.

The hotel has many rules and rituals: masturbation is banned, but sexual stimulation by the hotel maid is mandatory, and guests attend dances and watch propaganda extolling advantages of partnership.

Robert is caught masturbating, and the hotel manager burns his fingers in a toaster. Relationships require partners to have a distinguishing trait in common. John is told a woman has arrived with a limp, but he says she limps from an injury that will heal and is not a suitable match.

Residents can extend their deadline by hunting and tranquilizing the single people who live in the forest; each captured "loner" earns them a day. On one hunt, a woman with a fondness for biscuits offers David sexual favors, which he declines. She tells him that if she fails to find a mate, she will kill herself by jumping from a hotel window.

John then wins the affections of a woman with constant nosebleeds by purposely smashing his nose in secret. They move to the couples section to begin a month-long trial partnership. David later decides to court a notoriously cruel woman who has tranquilized more loners than anyone else. Their initial conversation is interrupted by the screams of the biscuit-loving woman, who has severely injured herself jumping from a window. Although troubled by the incident, David pretends to enjoy the woman's suffering to gain the heartless woman's interest. He later joins her in a jacuzzi, and she feigns choking; when he does not attempt help, she decides they are a match. The two are shifted to the couples' suite. When David wakes up one morning, he finds she has kicked David's brother (in dog form) to death. When David cries in response, she concludes their relationship is a lie and drags him to the hotel manager to have him punished by turning him into an animal that no one likes. However, he escapes and, with the help of a sympathetic maid, tranquilizes and transforms his partner into an unspecified animal.

Escaping the hotel, David joins the loners in the woods. In contrast to the hotel's rules, they forbid any romance, with mouth mutilation as punishment. The hotel maid is a mole for the loners, planted in the hotel to sabotage it. The leader of the loners (Léa Seydoux) takes loners to visit the city to get some supplies.

The loners launch a mini-raid to sabotage the hotel's work. David reveals to the nosebleed woman that John has been faking, and he forces David to leave. Other loners hold the hotel manager and her husband at gunpoint, tricking him into shooting his wife to save himself, but the gun is not loaded, leaving the couple to face each other.

Soon David, who is shortsighted, begins a secret relationship with a shortsighted woman (Rachel Weisz). They develop a gestural code for communication. They plan to escape together, but the leader finds the shortsighted woman's journal and discovers her plan to escape with David. She takes the woman to the city, ostensibly to have an operation to cure her shortsightedness, but blinds her instead. In anger, the woman kills the hotel maid, thinking she is killing the leader.

She tells David about her blindness. They try to find something else they have in common, but to no avail. He says they'll figure it out, and tells her to continue with their plan. Early the next morning, David overpowers and ties up the leader, leaving her to be eaten by dogs. He and the blind woman escape to the city, stopping at a restaurant. Seeking to reestablish commonality, David goes to the restroom and prepares to blind himself with a steak knife. The blind woman waits at the table for him to return.

Production

Principal photography began on 24 March 2014, and concluded on 9 May 2014. Filming took place in Dublin, Ireland, which represents "The City" in the film, and also at locations in and around County Kerry, including Sneem, Dromore Woods and Kenmare.

Marketing and distribution

In May 2014, it was announced that Sony Pictures acquired the distribution rights for Australia, New Zealand, German-speaking Europe, Scandinavia, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. A film still featuring Farrell, Whishaw, and Reilly was released around the same time. In May 2015, Alchemy acquired United States distribution rights; however, due to the company's financial struggles at the time, A24 acquired the US rights instead. Originally scheduled for an 11 March 2016 release, it was re-scheduled to 13 May 2016.

Critical response

The Lobster received acclaim from film critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a rating of 89% based on reviews from 201 critics, with an average score of 7.6/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "As strange as it is thrillingly ambitious, The Lobster is definitely an acquired taste – but for viewers with the fortitude to crack through Yorgos Lanthimos' offbeat sensibilities, it should prove a savory cinematic treat." At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 82, based on 44 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".

Oliver Lyttelton of The Playlist awarded the film an "A" grade and described it as "an atypically rich and substantial comedy" with "an uproarious yet deadpan satire concerning societal constructs, dating mores and power structures that also manages to be a surprisingly moving, gloriously weird love story." He concluded that the film was Lanthimos' "most accessible and purely enjoyable film yet". Chris Nashawaty of Entertainment Weekly gave a positive review and commended the film for being "visually stunning, narratively bold, and totally singular", adding that "it opens [one's] eyes to a new way of storytelling."

Guy Lodge, writing for Variety, called the film "a wickedly funny, unexpectedly moving satire of couple-fixated society", elaborating that Lanthimos' "confounding setup emerges as a brilliant allegory for the increasingly superficial systems of contemporary courtship, including the like-for-like algorithms of online dating sites and the hot-or-not snap judgments of Tinder."

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian rated the film three stars out of five, and wrote that The Lobster is "elegant and eccentric in Lanthimos’ familiar style", but "appears to run out of ideas at its mid-way point". IGN awarded it a score of 8.5 out of 10, saying "Colin Farrell heads up this surreal, hilarious and ultimately quite disturbing tale."

Wai Chee Dimock, writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, called The Lobster a "fable of purgatory" and saw the ending not as "a romanticism finally let out of the bag, but a romanticism handicapped and disabled." She compared the film to the work of Samuel Beckett, saying that, for this all-Greek team, "absurdist theater is second nature, as it was second nature to the Irish Beckett a century ago."