Emperor's New Suit?

Rating: 3/10 (3 October 2016)

Plenty enough people assured me I would "love" Yorgos Lianthos's first English-language film, and I went in expecting quirky/surreal/bizarre. The Lobster is all of these things, without being remotely engaging. Whoever is behind the hype machine is the real genius of the piece; well before we punters were suckered into chancing our arm, a cast of some of contemporary cinema's shining lights signed up for this dog's dinner. Like us, they had no doubt been promised a film the likes of which they had never encountered before and, in this at least, there's some truth. It's hard to recall a more outstandingly irritating movie for many a long year. There's an absurdist central concept and a curious, curious setting that could have given rise to something weird and wonderful. Instead we got abstract, self- conscious irony that quickly became silly and, ultimately, silly. The Lobster is the type of boring, unfunny film that critics seem determined to praise and whose cleverness can be appreciated only by the Curzon enlightened. On this one I shall have to remain in the dark.