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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

‘The Lobster’ cooks in lukewarm water

Dan Webster

David, the protagonist in Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos’ movie “The Lobster,” is in a bad situation. Just dumped by his wife, David – played by a pudgy Colin Farrell – is forced to take up residence in the strangest hotel imaginable.

Upon checking in, he is told that he has 45 days to find a romantic partner – gay or straight, though not bisexual – or he will be transformed into an animal. He does, of course, have some choice in the matter: He’ll be able to choose what animal he wants to become. Which is what his brother did, a fact we know because his brother is the dog that accompanies David during his hotel check-in.

For David, who seems destined for transformation, the animal he wants to become is the one that Lanthimos uses for his film’s title: a lobster. Why? Because, David explains, lobsters live for 100 years and they remain sexually active the whole time.

And that’s the world that Lanthimos throws us into, one that is as dystopian as it is dismaying. It’s a world that, in so many ways, is also incomprehensible, mainly because David’s life gets progressively more weird. During his stay at the hotel, where partners come together through the sharing of common traits – near-sightedness, for example, or the tendency to bleed spontaneously from the nose – David eventually pairs up with a woman who has no heart, no feelings of tenderness whatsoever.

So he, softie that he inherently is, has to pretend that he is heartless, too – though his pretense slips when his new mate targets his canine brother, which causes David to strike back. After he does, suddenly enough, David finds himself in a forest filled with “loners,” the revolutionaries whose life outside mainstream culture involves running around and dodging the hotel’s residents, who hunt them with drug-laced dart guns.

Ultimately, David does find love – though life among the “loners” turns out to be every bit as demented as life in the hotel, where any kind of sexual activity outside of partnerships is strictly prohibited. In the forest, self-gratification is fine, but any kind of hanky-panky between humans is forbidden. And when David’s lover is dealt with harshly, he faces a choice that seems even more appalling than being transformed into a crustacean.

Lanthimos, who both co-wrote and directed “The Lobster,” creates his grotesque world-view from the opening scene. A woman driving a car, suddenly stops, gets out, stumbles a few feet across a field, pulls out a pistol and shoots what looks like a donkey. Then as she walks away, another donkey comes over and nudges the now dead animal. No context is provided, no explanation given.

Like the best theater of the absurd – Samuel Beckett’s play “Krapp’s Last Tape,” for example – some early moments in “The Lobster” seem funny. But that feeling fades, leaving us with a sense of fatalism but without a larger sense of actual meaning.

Madman that he was, Beckett could do both. Imagine what he could do with a man who yearns to be a lobster.