The Lobster

The Lobster remains strangely romantic throughout, an absurdist take on the notion that great love stories — Casablanca, The Way We Were, Gone With the Wind — don't always end tidily.

A movie that explores the full spectrum of relationships with impeccable wit, delightfully dark humor and insights so sharp they verge on deadly.

Another strange, sometimes harrowing exercise in absurdity that resonates despite its weirdness.

The Greek filmmaker builds a stunning world with The Lobster, and much of its success stems from the inherent mechanics and the less-is-more storytelling that drops empty spaces for the mind to paint.

It may be based on universal human anxieties about love, relationships, compatibility and loneliness, but Filippou’s script takes on a defiant, prickly life of its own, refusing to play as an easy allegory.

The Lobster is more than a satire on the dating game. It digs deeper, needling at the status of our most tender emotions.

More a movie that you appreciate and ponder than one you embrace and enjoy. Whatever its intellectual pretensions, I am looking forward to never seeing it again.

In just two hours, Lanthimos built a complicated world and created its own boundaries and limits. He showed us two perspectives of this world from the same character. He showed us the character suffering, sacrificing, being in love, finding peace but also sorrow. He built up to an ending that left me on the edge of my seat, with feelings I don’t quite know how to process. This world and this man are far too complicated to express in simple forms. We can see loneliness. We can see companionship. They are easy to comprehend. It is what lies between them that is hard for all of us to make sense of.

Has a lot to say about love, compromise and monogamy in modern society, but I think it maybe gets a little too lost trying to be weird for the sake of being weird. I know this is Yorgos we're talking about here and this is still unmistakably a film spun from his unique style and voice, but I think some of the choices with regard to the dialogue left things feeling a bit too stilted and unnatural for my tastes. Granted, I'm certain that's the point, but it kind of came off as zero calorie Wes Anderson at times. Still, the initial concept is magnetic and fun to muse on, with a lot of the scenes in the first half of things representing some of my favorite moments from the project as a whole. And, while the second half kind of wore my attention a tad thin, I think the ending makes up for some of that meandering. All in all, not my favorite of the director's, but a great touchstone for his unique brand of storytelling.

Yorgos Lanthimos' The Lobster opens spectacularly, inviting your imagination to explore the grand dystopian future it presents. It proceeds to dole out sharp commentary on society's pressure to find and maintain a relationship at any cost, even by introducing a child to the dysfunction. However, all this goes to waste as The Lobster overstays its welcome. Without much more to say, the film drags along, promising a grand revelation in its finale. Alas, the final scene was telegraphed long ago to anyone paying attention, and lingers in the air like rotting shellfish.

How does a movie go from extremely promising and interesting to a complete flop by the end? I’m not exactly sure, but the lobster manages to do just that in spectacular fashion. It’s almost as if the director wanted you to not like this movie. And some avant- grade pseudo intellectuals will jump at the opportunity to waste their time in the most pretentious way. There are some entertaining and humorous bits, but this movie never seems to understand when to pull back or accept that this should have just been a dystopian dark comedy, and not some lame attempt to preach the directors cynical beta male view of the world onto the audience. The basic motive and plot is so philosophically flawed that it seems like a 3rd grader wrote it, yet no one ever seems to catch how funny that is. Not the director or the cast, because later it devolves into awful sermonizing that is self defeating and horribly non entertaining. I kept hoping that maybe their would be some redeeming characteristic of ending to the movie, but alas it crashed and burned entirely as the movie progressed. Not to mention the major plot holes like “how come they can mess up change someone’s defining characteristic? Or why don’t they both just have an interest in something other than themselves? Like the real world.” Eventually the failed attempt at meaningful subtext is underwhelming and frustrating to the point of no return. If I see this director make another movie or this studio I’m almost bound to steer clear after that train wreck and waste of a talented acting cast and an original intriguing dystopian idea. This flopped hard halfway through.

Its story is a horrible mess and this is damaged further by the terrible pacing. Characters just come and go and you won't feel anything. Story has a good ring to it but the execution is so bad that it was wasted. It was rushed.