Offbeat, timely, and profound: the best thing I've seen this year

Rating: 9/10 (20 January 2016)

The Lobster, with its absurd premise and stilted dialogue delivery, breaks countless cinematic rules and the expectations of even a seasoned audience to become arguably one of the best movies to have been made this year.
Colin Farrell plays David, a middle-aged man whose wife has recently left him. In this dystopian world of his, single people are taken to a hotel, where they are given a chance to find themselves partners within fortyfive days, failing which they are turned into an animal of their choice. Once David checks into the hotel, he's issued clothes and shoes, and assigned a single room. If he manages to find a partner, he will be upgraded to a double room, and the hotel management will monitor his relationship for four weeks before allowing him and his partner to move to the city together. Residents at the hotel can extend their stay by hunting down escapees, who they tranquilise with dart guns â€“ each loner hunted down adds an extra day to the hunter's stay. After David escapes from the hotel, he comes upon a band of renegades who have, if possible, an even stricter code to live by. They are loners, and are forbidden any sexual interaction. When he meets a woman among them (Rachel Weisz) who is short-sighted like him, they fall in love and plan to escape to the city together.
This is as far as I am willing to go in revealing the plot. I am told that Yorgos Lanthimos, the director, typically uses stilted dialogue and ritualised actions in his films. The Lobster is his first English venture and features both heavily. The rather offbeat humour might take some getting used to. What is striking, however, is the quiet undercurrent of desperation that both Farrell and Weisz manage to channel underneath those poker faces. The deadpan expressions of all the characters and the near-surgical precision with which they communicate with each other belies the tragedy of living in a world where the worth of people are measured by their romantic proclivities. Rather paradoxically, the eccentricities of the characters, the events, and the plot serve to heighten this feeling of world-weariness, and makes the film more believable for viewers.
In fact, The Lobster is ultimately a success because of its paradoxes. Invigoratingly ambitious and enthusiastically weird till the very end, it plays out like an Orwellian ballad for the twentyfirst century, a masterful allegory of the times. It's one of those movies that work because they capture the zeitgeist so wonderfully. In a decade that has seen the rise of Tinder, OkCupid, dating algorithms, left-swiping, and selfies, no movie seems more timely, no movie sounds more urgent. Spike Jonze's Her, another movie of this decade on the theme of futuristic dating, seems laughably optimistic in retrospect. The Lobster is not only far cleverer, it is also far more breathtakingly imaginative, and so wonderfully scripted that it was hard to find faults with, except perhaps the presence of a few lines of dialogue in French which added nothing to the movie, seeing as how the film-makers deemed it unnecessary to provide subtitles for them. All said and done, this is a movie that awards repeated viewing and will, I can staunchly claim, go on to join the pantheon of dystopian futuristic movies that will continue to be discussed even fifty years hence. Two thumbs up.