Unique but slightly disappointing

Rating: 8/10 (4 March 2017)

Yorgos Lanthimos has the great virtue of looking at our modern world with great insight and dissecting it for us. He turns the insight into a metaphor, and presents the freakishness of our society in essence, for what it is, not or what we've come to accept as normal.
In this film, Lanthimos reflects on the pressures that single people have to endure in our society: why are you single? why haven't you married yet? You should date and mate a person like you (meaning, your own social class, race, country, tribe, religion, age, etc.). You should allow somebody else to decide what's best for you (your parents, the group, or the algorithm of a dating site). You shouldn't (mustn't) have sexual relationships with your partner until you marry, or you should have meaningless sexual contacts until you marry. All of those things are societal and cultural, not natural, they treat the single person as an object to manipulate. All of this pressure and questions are analyzed in the film but with a detached mind, masterly, so you might ask, what has this to do with reality? The answer is everything! This is an intellectualizing exercise about reality, the reality of being single in the present day and world.
The script is very original -- unique. The actors are all good in their roles, especially having into account the material they've been given. The mood is also great; there is this 70s sort of vintage cold vibe that really suits the story. Some of the scenes in the film are great, as well; my favorite ones being the getaways of the singles to the city, the visit to the supermarket, the flamingo in the middle of the forest, or the group of singles taming their libido with dance music in the middle of the forest. You might find others more of your liking. There are plenty of odd scenes, dialogues and images, some of them really gory, and not my taste, but really impacting.
A few things annoyed me in the film, and most of them come from the direction and the script. 1/ I can appreciate the intellectual exercise, but I wasn't able to empathize with any of the characters. The script didn't take me from my head to my heart; a frigid world with frigid characters, even those supposedly in love. I couldn't care about them, unfortunately. 2/ The script is too rigid. The actors had no permission to improvise and develop their characters, something that would have give them depth and humanity. The actors were repeating sentences as robots, and that was what felt like. I'm sure that is intentional but, again, if you don't touch my heart, I won't give a dam about the story. 3/ There are a lot of outdoor scenes in the film, yet the cinematography is grim and alien-like. I thought of the way the forest was incorporated into the story of Fahrenheit 451; the forestry and city in this film are not hostile or beautiful, more flat than anything else. I found they lacked on cinematographic and narrative treatment to incorporate them into the story. It might be intentional, but it didn't work for me. 4/ I was expecting dark deadpan humour and found deadpan horror, so that was a bit of slap on the face; the horror took me aback, and I didn't find enough funny elements, more absurd and grotesque ones.
This is one of those films rarely produced in English, certainly an European film because I find difficult to imagine a film like this being produced in the US: elitist, daring, merciless and ruthless. Unique film-making for sure, mentally satisfying, but also disappointing and emotionally frigid to me.