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"Surprisingly touching, [The Lobster] takes adult worries over loneliness, solitude and coupledom and sends them into a perverse alternate world." – MUBI Notebook
Winner of this year's Cannes Jury Prize, the new film and English-language debut from the wonderfully idiosyncratic mind of director Yorgos Lanthimos (Alps, MIFF 2012; Dogtooth, MIFF 2009) is a deadpan absurdist satire of modern romance that could only have come from the Greek auteur.
In the near future, single citizens are sent to a hotel where they have 45 days to pair off with a mate – or be turned into the animal of their choosing and hunted in the woods. Starring Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz and Léa Seydoux, among many others, The Lobster is fiercely, unmistakably Lanthimos: by turns surreal, grimly funny and strangely moving. It's the work of one of contemporary cinema's true originals.
"A funny, unsettling, occasionally gruesome riff on the way a society can prioritize long-term relationships ... There's comedy that's weird for its own sake, and then there's this." – The AV Club