Appalling and vile.

Rating: 1/10 (3 March 2017)

A film that ought to ooze charm, wit and menace – instead The Lobster, complete with its ludicrous plot, is extremely heavy-handed, and due to gratuitous scenes of animal cruelty, repellent.
The stilted dialogue implies a disingenuous subservience to a pervasive totalitarianism. It is as convincing as the overdubbed voice-tracks on early 1970s German sex comedies. The standard of acting is no better – Farrell and Weisz sleepwalk and procrastinate unnecessarily throughout the movie. The production values are non-existent – whatever budget the director had available was clearly spent on renting a hotel for a day or two and hiring the cast. A cast that that largely appear to regret ever becoming involved in this train crash of a film.
The Lobster is desperate to both unsettle and amuse. Excepting a kitsch performance of Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart by the hotel managers, there are no smiles. Animal cruelty aside, this film is less disturbing – and not as credible - as Santa Claus Conquers The Martians.
Unsurprisingly, the ending is abrupt and unfathomable; no doubt designed to seed speculation and debate on internet forums.
The film would love to be Kafkaesque. Orwellian, even. It dreams of being Terry Gilliam's Brazil. But The Lobster is not even poor man's science fiction. No self-respecting art house cinema should even consider screening this drivel. No thrift store should accept unwanted DVD and Blu Ray copies of this utter tosh.
There are online sci-fi shorts with more imagination, flair and purpose than The Lobster. It is an absolute waste of celluloid. It is two hours of your life that you will not get back.