The Lobster
Giorgos Lanthimos / IE, GB, FR, GR, NL, 2015 / 118 min.
Oscar-nominated director Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth) directed Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz and Léa Seydoux in this deadpan, surrealist fable about a future world that forces people to find a new partner or face changing into an animal.
Lanthimos” first English film won the Cannes Jury award. The magical-realist, parallel world presented in this film is reminiscent of the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, José Saramago or JG Ballard. David (Colin Farrell) is an ordinary, slightly overweight man who has just been dumped by his wife. The lonely heart is summoned to a kind of love hotel, where he needs to find a new partner within 45 days. If he fails, he will shapeshift into an animal.
The only good news is that David gets to choose the kind of animal he will change into. David decides on the lobster, because he loves the sea.Soon, however, he is confronted with an underground movement headed by Léa Seydoux that resists the prescribed mating culture.
This world full of absurd, but rigorously applied laws strongly recalls Lanthimos' Alps and Dogtooth, with its isolated family and its own inscrutable rules. Lanthimos cast his surrealist but seriously proposed and highly consistent allegory on existential loneliness in a cool retro look.
Details
Director
Giorgos Lanthimos
Production year
2015
Country
IE, GB, FR, GR, NL
Original title
Lobster, The
Length
118 min.
Format
DCP - encrypted
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