The Lobster review – surreal satire and black-humour laughs

Dogtooth director Yorgos Lanthimos’s first English-language film is built upon a typically arch and surreally deadpan conceit. Co-written with long-time collaborator Efthymis Filippou, the film occupies a (near future/parallel?) European dystopia in which human partnership is obligatory, and habitual singletons are turned into animals. Colin Farrell is the recently separated David, confined to a hotel-cum-prison where he must find a suitable mate or be transformed into the titular crustacean. Among the other inmates are a nervy Ben Whishaw (“I have a limp, which is also my defining character trait”), a lisping John C Reilly, and Ashley Jensen’s desperately accommodating “Biscuit Woman”. Meanwhile, out in the wild woods, Léa Seydoux’s “Loner Leader” and Rachel Weisz’s “Short-Sighted Woman” forge the rebel resistance – dancing alone, forbidding intimacy, and preparing stoically for a solitary death in a grave of their own digging. As with 2011’s Alps (and its more celebrated predecessor Dogtooth), The Lobster balances jet-black humour with a hint of Nigel Kneale horror and a smidgen of satirical sadness as it teases out its ritualised rules of engagement, asking what we really want/get from love and relationships. Olivia Colman raises the biggest laughs as the Nurse Ratched-y hotel manager who assures new couples that “children can be provided” should they face irreconcilable differences, and Farrell makes us believe in his absurdist situation. It all gets a bit lost in the woods, but there’s enough finely honed madness in the corridors of the hotel to cover the price of a room.