A dead zone

Rating: 5/10 (3 January 2017)

"The Lobster" is certainly a challenging viewing experience, and it is a challenge I wasn't equal to.
Conceptually, it is like Peter Greenaway's "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover", and the short stories of Australian writer Peter Carey.
People have described it as existing in a dystopian near future, but I don't find that approach necessary to understand the movie. Like Greenaway's movies and Carey's short stories, it's a fable: something we're not supposed to be able to place on a realistic timeline. It's just food for thought.
The difference is that, in "Her Lover", Greenaway starts with a metaphorical situation and piles on the meaning until you have no choice but to work it out for yourself. The style is such that you can't look away.
"The Lobster"'s style is no style. Even the performances are drained of any and all emotion. People say and do the most outrageous and bizarre things, and it's just not that interesting. I wanted to look away, and I did.
It hurts to react with disinterest toward what is an intriguing central premise: a world where single people are forced to check into a hotel where they must find a partner before time runs out. Those that remain single are turned into animals.
In the hotel, people are paired up for stunningly arbitrary reasons, eg. people who limp are paired together, people who are short sighted, and people who have nosebleeds. The similarities are so inconsequential that they are easily faked: one man bangs his face on the wall to make his nose bleed to hook up with a woman whose nose bleeds spontaneously.
Outside the hotel, "loners" live in the woods, espousing a polar opposite ethos: for them, any and all romance is criminal, and acts of intimacy are punished with mutilation of the lips.
At this stage, I had lost interest. The movie becomes predictable in its unpredictability: you tire of seeing so many inexplicable things on screen. The true lack of style is depressing and hard to watch.
This is a movie that sucks life out of you, and I didn't appreciate it for that reason.