The Lobster (2015)

User Review

• 

  BarneyNuttall

  8 / 10

  As a massive fan of Yorgos Lanthismos' work, I have been positively trembling to see this film. Lanthimos brings a clinical dread to all his films which are stitched together with the oiliest black comedy making for an experience which is always memorable, to say the least. I remember watching Dogtooth for the first time and being gobsmacked at the violence and twisted visions of love and sex. The Lobster delivers the same again but with a pedestrian love story at its core.
  
  The concept of The Lobster is so Lanthimos it is almost a parody. Animals and animalistic sex devoid of passion, strange childish language, and sudden horrific, yet cruelly humorous, violence all make up The Lobster. Alongside this, we have a host of wonderful performances. While I enjoyed the performances of Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, our leads, I often felt the side characters overshadowed them, which may be the point. Angeliki Papoulia's Heartless Woman instantly puts us back into the cold Greecian compound of Dogtooth and Ashley Jensen brings desperation and true loneliness, something that she handled superbly in Extras.
  
  While I like the mashing up of a simple love story with the discomfort of Lanthimos' cinema, you can see cinema influence the entire way through the film, I couldn't engage with our characters. When it came to shocking moments, such as the last scene, I shriveled and expunged great concern through sweat and bleating 'don't do that, don' do that' but only because of the visceral horror. Whether I was engaged with the characters was a whole other fish. Or perhaps lobster.

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