A terrifying dystopia created by the brilliant Yorgos Lanthimos

Rating: 10/10 (22 February 2017)

One of 2016's most unique and bizarre films is the pitch-black comedy, "The Lobster". Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, an idiosyncratic Greek 'angry young man' filmmaker who had previously garnered both praise and excoriation with his 2009 Oscar-nominated "Dogtooth", this provocative and uncompromising surrealist masterpiece is set in a dystopian near-future in which only couples are allowed to survive. If any unfortunate citizen should become single through divorce or death, they are given 45 days to find a new mate to marry or are punished by being transformed into an animal and released into the woods. The one silver lining in this dark cloud is that each unsuccessful single gets to choose which animal. A lobster is the bizarre choice of our protagonist, an emotionally scarred architect named David, brilliantly played by Colin Farrell with a perennial deer-in-the-headlights expression. Rachel Weisz is the woman with whom he forms a bond in the film's second half when he fatefully falls into a group of rebels who have made it illegal to couple.
Almost universally lauded by critics for being a razor-sharp satire of societal templates examining sexual mores and the desperately sad world of single dating, "The Lobster" is also a moving if unconventional love story rooted in the theater of the absurd, a Kafkaesque fable that perfectly combines Swiftian wit with Mozartian elegance as, in the words of one critic, "it opens (one's) eyes to a new way of storytelling." It is rare cinematic caviar for both the eyes and the mind of the most discriminating. As to the film's fastidiously luxurious visual style, Lanthimos seems the successor to Stanley Kubrick -- but as if the director of "A Clockwork Orange" had mated with a scorpion.
Although it won the Jury Prize at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, many will not like this film. Samuel Beckett would have. I've seen it half a dozen times, each time loving it more. For the discerning few, this will be one of the most memorable cinematic experiences of recent years. For the rest, they can keep waiting for Godot.