The Lobster makes compulsory coupledom bleakly funny, with Colin Farrell giving its rules a painfully human cost. The hotel satire is sharper than what follows, but the awkward tenderness keeps us interested when the plotting slackens.
Yorgos Lanthimos takes the pressure to settle down and gives it an official penalty: find a partner or cease to be human. The Lobster is a good, disquieting comedy whose hotel scenes make familiar questions about our love lives sound faintly threatening. We recommend it to anyone with a taste for humour delivered without reassurance. The script, by Efthimis Filippou and Yorgos Lanthimos, makes its absurd rule easy to grasp, then watches people try to accommodate it.
Colin Farrell is crucial as David, looking so thoroughly defeated that even making conversation seems an effort. The performance has none of the charm that might let us dismiss him as a romantic lead temporarily down on his luck. We felt unexpectedly protective of him; his hesitant, flattened delivery makes the business of finding a partner seem exhausting before it has begun. He makes us notice David’s distress even when the joke works, without asking the other actors to soften their treatment of him.
Olivia Colman plays the Hotel Manager with a certainty that makes the arrangement seem almost administratively sensible. She never supplies the little wink that would give us permission to stand outside the joke. John C. Reilly’s Lisping Man and Ben Whishaw’s Limping Man belong to a society that can reduce people to a single distinguishing feature, and the names make the nastiness plain. The danger is that the supporting characters can become examples in a lecture, though the actors keep them awkward enough to seem human.
Thimios Bakatakis’s cinematography makes the hotel an uncomfortable place to look at: people sharing the same space seem stranded there. Jacqueline Abrahams’s production design gives the institutional setting a dispiriting respectability. The hotel needs to look plausible, because an obviously fantastical prison would let ordinary social expectations off too easily. Here, the surroundings help us understand why the guests might accept the rules before they question them.
Editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis gives the deadpan exchanges enough room for their discomfort to register, and the pauses are often funnier than an extra line would be. The difficulty comes when the film has to sustain that rhythm across 119 minutes. Its second half is less concentrated, with new characters arriving before the existing ideas have been worked through. Stretches begin to feel like further demonstrations of something the hotel has already established, despite the continuing commitment of the performances.
Rachel Weisz helps prevent the severity from becoming monotonous. Her performance allows a little tenderness into a film whose people have learned to discuss intimacy as though they were filling in a form. Black comedy needs some sense that its people can suffer, and here the rigid delivery sometimes makes their unhappiness difficult to reach. Lanthimos pushes the stiffness close to that limit, but enough vulnerability survives to make the humour uncomfortable for reasons beyond the strangeness of the premise.
We would save this for company that enjoys a comedy becoming uncomfortable. The violence is a real warning, and the deliberately stiff conversation will test anyone who needs the dialogue to sound like people they know. If either of you wants romance to be reassuring tonight, choose something else.
