What a Bunch of Animals

Rating: 6/10 (18 July 2016)

Yorgos Lanthimos disturbed the hell out of me with "Dogtooth," his Academy-Award nominated film from 2010, and I still can't get that cinematic mind f**k out of my head. Now he returns with another provocation, and while certainly giving my wife and I something to chat about afterwards, doesn't make the same impact that he did with his previous film.
"The Lobster" is billed as a dark comedy, and certainly the premise sounds like a bit of absurd surrealism: single people are taken into custody and sent to a hotel where they must fall in love within a certain number of days or turn into the animal of their choice. There are all sorts of rules in place within the hotel as well as punishments for breaking them. Outside of the hotel, a group of resistance fighters have created their own little society of single people, and impose as strict punishments for those caught falling in love as the hotel does for those who remain single. The whole thing is presented as a nightmarish alternate reality to the one we live in; as in the world created in "Dogtooth," everything is slightly off-kilter and out of step with the world as we know it, yet familiar enough to make us uncomfortable that it so closely resembles the one we live in.
The biggest problem with "The Lobster" is the inconsistency of tone. I never knew from one scene to the next if Lanthimos was striving and failing at black comedy, or whether I was supposed to be taking everything at face value. There's a lot going on in the film thematically to make it resonate strongly with the troubled times in which we live -- themes of totalitarian government, intolerance of differing lifestyles, cultural obsessions with placing people into easily identifiable categories, the absurdity of trying to manufacture love in this age of "The Bachelor" -- but unfortunately the languid, monotonous rhythm of the movie undermines its examination of any of these topics. The actors, many of them usually very good -- like Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Lea Seydoux, and John C. Reilly -- are directed to walk through the film in a deadpan haze. This maybe was an attempt by Lanthimos to establish an ironic distance, but it has the effect of making all of the characters, and as a result what happens to them, difficult to care about.
I like challenging, provocative cinema, but not when used to obfuscate rather than enhance.
Grade: B-