An Over-Cooked Crustacean

Rating: 1/10 (10 June 2016)

'The Lobster' proposes a pointless, puerile premise - that a society exists where people who fail to maintain a relationship with their spouse are sent to re-education camps. This rehab for singles takes the form of a regimented bourgeois hotel where the guests must find a replacement partner within 45 days. If they succeed, they are permitted to return to a dreary urban existence with their new significant other. If they fail to hook up with another person, the hapless losers are exiled to the surrounding forest where they are hunted down with tranquilizer guns, prior to being surgically transformed into an animal.
This fatuous fable is delivered with the vitality of a robot's daydream. The expressionless acting style and wooden script produces only tedium, punctuated by some random episodes of theatrical silliness and unpleasant cruelty. It's hard to see the point of this pretentious allegory - it could be a critique of society's regimentation or a caricature of transmigration, but then again, it might not. It's excessively generous to spend thirty seconds considering whether this dull farce possesses any meaning.