[135.5 points / 13 votes]
“Being newly single can be a very difficult adjustment to make. Especially when the police come and put you on a bus that takes you to a luxury hotel on the Irish coast, where you're given forty-five days to find a new partner, lest you be surgically transformed into an animal of your choosing. Unless, of course, you’re okay with violating some personal liberties with fistfulls of tranq darts…
“The Lobster is the most narratively, politically and viscerally exciting film I've seen since David Cronenberg's Crash. To view it is to feel within you a short circuit that sets the mind racing down countless paths. It is as chaotic, inescapable, daft and exhilarating as being alive, and you're never entirely ready for it.
“The just shy of genial atrophied charm of Colin Farrell is like a scalpel, and he gets that helplessness that comes with someone who thought they had a reliable longterm relationship and now has to recapture the part of themselves that they let start slipping away. Ben Whishaw and John C. Reilly are great at finding the core, reptilian selfishness that lurks deep inside even the kindest of folk. Lea Seydoux’s opposition leader encompasses so much that it would take an entire season of a cable drama to get at the meticulously arranged complexities that she puts forth in a cruel gesture. And what does it say that I imagine Olivia Colman’s character as one of the routinely deranged spokespersons we’ve been seeing everywhere since the inauguration?
“The Lobster is a film that demolishes your sense of security, yet leaves you invigorated and ready to start a new chapter in your love life. Or end one. It defies easy synopsis, yet any of its narrative facets is enough to hook potential viewers of all sorts. It has such a specific effect that a few years down the road, you may see it as cinematic shorthand in online dating profiles — or divorce settlements. It's a gloriously weird film, deeply funny, fiercely political, and oddly enough, overwhelmingly romantic (even as it could be seen as defiantly anti-romantic). After my first viewing, I spent a good half hour just trying to puzzle out the specifics of its SciFi angles- how such customs would develop, how technology would arise to fulfill the Hotel’s objective (or how the Hotel would be oriented around the capabilities of technology), how its central dialectic tension between the Hotel and the forest dwellers seems tied to Seydoux’s character’s family. “The Lobster encompasses multitudes, thankfully.” ~ Jason Shawhan
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