A surrealist observation of marriage and love

Rating: 7/10 (22 March 2020)

What a strange, grim movie. Yet it was surprisingly enjoyable. Let's go over the surrealist aspects of the film first: if you're the type of person who wants logical explanations, realistic premises, or any kind of closure in a film, then this is not for you. The Lobster is relentlessly absurd, and it demands a lot more out of its viewers than most other movies.
I love this kind of weirdness. Yes, the themes of this movie could have been explored in a more realistic and comprehensible manner. But we have so many of those already. I'm glad these kinds of movies can also exist.
So is the message of this film about love? Kind of. It's more about the institution of love. We have no federally enforced love laws, but societal pressures can sometimes be just as powerful. Anyone who's been single for a long stretch of time, especially over a certain age, probably knows how weird and absurd people can be about relationships. How people get annoyingly nosy and how they assume things about single people. How desperate some singles can get. The Lobster is about all this garbage our culture puts on us regarding love and marriage. So yes, it's about love, but not at all a romantic movie.
In fact, the bleary performances of the actors brought it down a few points below what I initially wanted to give it. I understand why they were directed like that. The Lobster's dystopia is full of people whose lives completely revolve around staying in these state-mandated relationships. These people are constantly miserable but don't even know it. While this was amusing in the first hour or so, it slowly started to falter as the movie stretched for another hour. I think some more cutting or performance adjusting would've done it good. As the humor faded toward the end, the nightmarish qualities of the movie got a little too real. Too bad "Deadpan horror" doesn't work as well as "deadpan humor."