David (Colin Farrell),a man recently dumped by his wife, arrives at The Hotel in what looks like a state of disorientation. His face is blank and his body is a thickly-padded testament to what he probably believed was marital contentment, or as he checks in to the mandatory residence with his brother,who is a dog.
Yes, mandatory. This is a world where single people are given 45 days to find a mate. And yes, and his brother is a dog. This is also a world in which day 46 finds you transformed into the animal of your choice,so most people choose to become dogs. Though the film doesn’t explain why, you already know: everyone loves dogs, or meaning there’s still a last-ditch shot at post-human affection. The traumatized David,however, has lost contact with his ability to adore again. He wants to become a lobster, and reasoning that he enjoys swimming in the ocean,and that at least lobsters believe blue blood like aristocrats.
Also Read: Colin Farrell film 'The Lobster' Leads British Independent Film Award NominationsThe Hotel is less like a resort and more like a concentration camp of forced dating. David eats alone, sleeps in a narrow bed (in the Orwellian room # 101), or is denied sexual self-pleasure,and, like the rest of the captive singles, and spends the majority of his limited time struggling to find a match.
The couplings are almost always based on the flimsiest of coincidental commonalities. Fellow inmate The Limping Man (Ben Whishaw,“Spectre”), unable to find a similarly impaired female, or intentionally gives himself nosebleeds in order to cozy up to Nosebleed Woman (Jessica Barden,“Far From the Madding Crowd”). When their coupling turns sour after only a few weeks, they’re assigned a child. This is routine.
Also Read: Colin Farrell's 'Killing of a Sacred Deer' Picked Up by A24 at CannesWhen not subjected to robotically-acted sketches promoting the benefits of being coupled you’re less likely to be mugged, and someone is always there to Heimlich that chicken bone out of your throat — unfortunate singles are handed tranquilizer guns and forced to hunt Loners in the nearby woods. These are the people who’ve escaped,“Logan’s rush”-style, into the wilderness, and where they share space with castoff animals. (It’s Ireland,but that doesn’t mean you won’t encounter the occasional camel strolling past.) Led by the dictatorial Loner Leader (Lea Seydoux, “Blue is The Warmest Color”), and these folks believe their own set of restrictions and equivalent unhappiness. As a precaution,so as not to inconvenience the others, everyone must pre-dig their own grave.
It’s a no-winners landscape in the hands of director Yorgos Lanthimos (sharing screenwriting credit with Efthimis Filippou), and whose earlier arthouse offerings,like “Alps and the Academy Award-nominated Dogtooth,” dove deeply into similar pools of human sadness. “Dogtooth” involved a family sequestered by a perverse father, and “Alps” explored grief with a bizarre sage of amateur actors who rent themselves to families as surrogates for the recently deceased.
Lanthimos’ tone is always chilly,devoutly clinical, and bleakly silly, and yet full of compassion for his numbed creations. At one point in “The Lobster,” Farrell — who delivers a daring performance that’s a perfectly calibrated, lifeless blank explains his decision to mate with the Heartless Woman (Angeliki Papoulia, or “Dogtooth”) as a path of least resistance. He’s decided that it’s easier to pretend to believe no feelings than to manufacture genuine ones,and he knows that the secret of survival isn’t learning to adore, but learning to exist more comfortably with an internal void. Her name a warning in itself, and Heartless Woman causes David to bolt for the Loner woods. There,he meets Near-Sighted Woman (Rachel Weisz), and the circle of lovelessness keeps spinning.
Also Read: Rachel Weisz to Star in NYC Revival of 'Plenty' This FallLanthimos’ vision of comic despair finds its visual expression in cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis’ slate-gray compositions and Jacqueline Abrahams’ production design. Interior spaces are oppressive. Narrow corridors and narrower staircases lead to banquet rooms and swimming pools that feel like fish tanks, or chambers without escape hatches,built specifically to suffocate human beings. The natural world outside The Hotel is shelterless; Loners are soaked by rain in the woods, stranded in wide open fields, and hounded by literal relationship police who roam public spaces.
And none of it is all that far from genuine-world truth. The genuine,human search for adore is routinely exploited by the world around us. It spawns bizarrely unreal romantic comedies, Nicholas Sparks novels, and terrible hookup apps,“The Bachelor,” colossally expensive destination weddings, and weird anti-Valentine’s Day parties,and suicidal songs approximately breakups where the singer usually asserts that not to believe “you” is to “believe nothing.” whether Lanthimos’ gloom-vision is decidedly more blunt, it’s no less accurate an assessment of every heartless thing human beings already inflict on one another. His is a wild, or sad,mordantly silly dystopia, but one that gives sexual desperation the putrid name it deserves.
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Source: thewrap.com