Premiere Date: 13th of May 2016
Director: Yorgos Lantimos
Screenwriter: Yorgos Lantimos, Efthymis Filippou
Cinematography: Thimios Bakatakis
Favorite Quote: “Don’t expect anyone else to dig your grave for you, or to carry your corpse. We’ll throw some dirt over you but that’s about it.” (Leader of the Loners)
The Lobster is a dystopian movie with a dark humor tone. It’s weird and it’s brilliant. It’s about David (Colin Farrell) trying to find love in a span of 45 days in a hotel for singles after his wife left him. He has to find someone or they will turn him into the animal he chose. The society they live in is very intolerant to singles. After trying hard, he decided to run away before they turned him into an animal and joined the “loners” (who also ran away) where it is forbidden to flirt with someone. He found love there, the Short Sighted Woman (Rachel Weisz). The story is just brilliant, it is different than other dystopian books I read/movies I watched such as The Divergent or The Giver. The soundtrack is superb, it sets the tone beautifully.
I found the story and message really different than the books I listed above. Those dystopian books paint a picture very different from what we are living today: wars which destroy the ecosystem, systems which group people based on their skills, etc. This movie’s dystopia was more close to the world we live in, where not reproducing/being single is seen as something sinful or something harmful to the society. Those notions are very slowly fading but they are still here, at least where I live. It made me think about how we are in a living semi-dystopian state as a world. Most of us are not forced to marry or reproduce by the government, but those traditions are still alive and well in our parents’ and grandparents’ minds as they unknowingly push us to choose such lifestyles. The movie was also satiric in the sense that it criticized one of the most important choices we make in our lives: “If you encounter any problems, any tensions, any arguing, that you cannot resolve yourselves, you will be assigned children. That usually helps, a lot.” I’m not at age where I’m not married and I don’t have any children, but I’ve heard this excuse a lot. Plus, the movie criticized the fact that we tend to connect with people who we share a common experience with. The girl who had a constant nosebleed married with the boy who faked to have nosebleed by hitting his nose to a surface to marry her. David, who wears glasses, fell in love with the Short Sighted Woman. When she got blind, he tried to blind himself too (we didn’t learn if he succeeded or not). This shows how our relationships lack depth. We think we are forming meaningful companionships because we share an experience. In essence, we are only connecting through our misery; misery loves company.
I liked the soundtrack too. When the singles were killing loners in the forest, it was in slow motion and there was classical music or a slow Greek song in the background. Those lovely classical pieces made a stark contrast with scenes of killing and running. I don’t know why I liked it but I liked it. Talking about the soundtrack, I really liked the accent. It wasn’t the usual British accent I heard so it’s nice to hear something different. I think Farrell talked with an Irish accent, I liked it but Weisz talked with an even more beautiful accent. I don’t know where that accent is from, but I really liked it. To summarize the movie, I think the movie had a lot of meaningful messages and I absolutely loved it !!