Margaret here, reporting from AFI Fest in Los Angeles..
The Lobster is the first English-language film from director Yorgos Lanthimos, Academy Award nominee for unsettling black comedy Dogtooth. The buzz since it debuted at Cannes (where it won the Jury Prize) has largely focused on its eyebrow-raising premise: in a society where being part of a couple is mandatory, the perpetually or recently single are rounded up and sent to The Hotel where they must either pair off or be turned into an animal. It's offbeat and biting and not for everyone, but it's also captivating and dryly hilarious. Here are five reasons you should check it out:
1) A bonkers premise improbably well-executed. The setup is so very odd that its ambition alone would make it worth seeing; the fact that the movie sells it without ever straining under the weight of exposition is masterful. In Lanthimos' bizarro world, where existing social rituals around courtship are both flattened and taken the extreme, lonely people scrutinize and reject each other with laughably trivial reasons and deadly serious consequences. Interactions are stilted, and many scenes sound for all the world like they've been dubbed over with a foreign-language translation, except what we're hearing are the actual words coming out of the actors' mouths. But the universe feels fully realized: odd as the relationship dynamics are, they're both internally consistent and recognizably human.
four more reasons after the jump...
2) A seamless ensemble. The Lobster has dream roster of character actors and movie stars--including Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Ben Whishaw, John C. Reilly, Lea Seydoux, and Olivia Colman--all turning in wonderful and wonderfully odd performances. (Everyone speaks in their natural accent, too, which is rare in multi-national casts and played so delightfully just last year in Grand Budapest Hotel.) Colin Farrell, made almost aggressively un-dreamy as a sad-sack arrival at The Hotel, gives a marvelously off-beat turn that oscillates between hysterical and heartbreaking. And the always-welcome Olivia Colman's exquisitely dry hotel manager nearly walks away with the movie.
3) Witty, understated design. Not overconcerned with telegraphing "this is speculative fiction!", the costume and production design is unshowy with touches of the uncanny, deceptively ordinary yet perfectly memorable.
4) The mesmerizing idiosyncrasy and pitch-black humor of Dogtooth-- with about 80% less stomach-turning tension. Loved the beyond-f#@*ed-up Dogtooth? You'll love The Lobster. Found Dogtooth nearly unwatchable? You may in fact still love The Lobster. It's not as gleefully revulsive, and while the humor is still exceptionally bleak it's also richer and more moving.
5) A surprisingly sweet love story. This being the work of Yorgos Lanthimos, it doesn't play conventionally. But somehow, despite the story's penchant for the cruel and cynical and outright gross, there's a credible blossoming between Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz of something tender and worth rooting for.
Oscar chances? For 2015, nil. The release has just been scheduled for March of next year. This seems pretty squarely planted in too-weird-for-Oscar territory regardless.