The Lobster

Alright. This film. Not sure how many people - if any - are aware of it but it came out maybe this week? Couple of days ago. Went to go see it yesterday with my mother (because I'm great) and, hmm.

Now see. How it was initially summed up to me was "Colin Farrell plays a man who must find a partner or else be turned into a lobster" and that is basically it. The premise of the film - in broad strokes - is that if you are a single person, you are taken to this hotel where you have a set amount of days to pair off, form a relationship and leave or else you are turned into an animal of your choice.

That is the barebones concept for the film. I like that. I love that. It sounds like something I'd write. And it's got Colin Farrell! And Oliva Colman! And John C Reily! And it's shot really well! I should have liked it.

To be blunt, I did not. But I wanted to, I really, really wanted to.

I could - and did, before I cut it out - launch into a vitriloic and in-depth explanation of why, but I would much much rather hear what anyone else thought of it, especially if they liked it.

Assuming anyone else saw it at all...

edited 23rd Oct '15 5:07:27 AM by JJMarmite

For one brief moment, after seeing the thread title, I held hope that the studios had somehow adopted Lobster Johnson to the big screen without me hearing about it beforehand. Oh, well.

Never heard of this movie.

I just looked up this movie and it's 91 % on Rotten Tomatoes? Wow.

Or Lobster Random, that would have been good too.

And that's what I'm talking about! 91%! Am I missing something? If so, what? I am mystified.

Just explain what you thought was wrong with the movie since no one else here has seen it

edited 29th Oct '15 2:49:01 PM by Xopher001

If anyone else is still following this thread, I saw this movie yesterday. Intriguing worldbuilding, but the characters are all pretty wooden. I think that might be part of the point (how desensitized they've become) but it does make it a bit hard to get invested, and the contrast with all the dramatic orchestral music, especially at apparently mundane moments, makes it very confusing tonally. I don't know if that's the problem the OP had or if there was a moral issue.

(The funny thing is I had a sense going in that it would be similar to High-Rise, which I'd seen the week before and which had a similarly off-putting mix of a clinically detached tone and bizarre brutality. But I couldn't not check this out.)

Okay so I kinda abandoned this after I dropped my useless drivel originally and I’m sorry about that.

My main, biggest issue with the lobster was the wooden characters. I think this must have been a directorial decision because it was something everyone did and it was something being done by actors I know can actually act. Every single character has the same flat, monotone delivery and every single character speaks the same dull, literal, plodding, this-is-a-list-of-facts lines. I felt less like I was watching a selection of characters and more like it was some strange hive mind taking turns speaking out of different mouths. Nothing differentiated these characters, or if I did I missed it. If everyone had been wearing those weird disguise suits from Scanner Darkly you wouldn’t have been able to tell who was who by how they acted. Maybe that’s just me.

My actual real issue was that if I were to write down all the little bits that went into making the Lobster (apart from the message of…single people being vilified by society? Which I still don’t get, though apparently it’s a thing so hell) I should like it. It’s an interesting sounding setup, and there’s no real explanation that I saw as to why they feel the need to do what they’re doing. I like that. They hunt people in the woods and get bussed out to do it. I like that (though why all these people hang around in woods nearby to a place they know houses people who want to hunt them is anyone’s guess). They toast a guy’s hand because he touched himself. The whole thing sounds like a surreal mess of weird and that should be good. But the way it came together just made me so very, very angry. Maybe it was seeing something I should have liked come together in such an unenjoyable way. Maybe I’m just not a very nice person.

That probably hasn’t cleared it up at all. And I’m probably wrong about a bunch of things too as it was a while ago now and I left before it finished because I was so very, very angry.

PS: I actually really liked High Rise a lot. A lot a lot. Probably because the actors were allowed to put intonation into their lines.

It's about how the expectations people place on each other, especially in relationships, are completely unrealistic and bizarre unto themselves. It's about the idea that you must be in a relationship and that if you're not you'll be ousted from 'normal' society, the idea that if you reject conventional relationships you're part of some outsider guerilla movement, and how leaving your fellow loners is a betrayal of the worst kind. It's about how falling deeply, madly in love and bonding over one thing isn't enough by itself, that you need to be willing to work through your differences, find something else to connect over, or else be willing to accept that you might not be right for each other. Or you could just bite the bullet and fully commit to the relationship come hell or high water, even if it feels like gouging your eyes out.

I mean, it's all allegorical, and subject to your own interpretation, what you bring to it.

The stilted performances are there to underline how unnatural every part of this is— not just the metaphor of this dystopian otherworld, but the social landscape it represents. The classical music and highly mannered staging is meant to further draw into stark relief the absurdity of it all by rendering it as austere, almost prim fashion. Relationships are messy and passionate and human in all the ways this movie is not.

I couldn't recommend it to everyone, but I'm glad I finally saw it.