The Lobster

There are rules that you must follow every day, quite contradictory, depending where you stay, some encourage you to mingle, others like you to stay single, contravention has a hefty price to pay. No evidence exists for these directions, though they're pursued by folk with little hesitation, but occasionally you'll see, someone escape and run and flee, as they wish to play, by other regulations.

A wonderful piece of filmmaking, that perfectly captures the often ridiculous actions, activities and exertions we all undertake, to a certain degree, in order to comply with the beliefs that are indoctrinated into us from a very early age and, if you're lucky, able to wash away, as the pretence is discovered and replaced by those carefully recrafted by yourself.

The Lobster is a surreal deadpan comedy about the strangeness of social pressures and modern relationships.

The setting is a bleak, tightly controlled hotel on the coast of Ireland. David (Colin Farrell), a recently divorced Architect, is given 40 days to find a partner or else be transformed into an animal of his choosing; in this case, a lobster. Sound strange? That's just the first 10 minutes. Guests of the hotel are subjected to routine trips to shoot 'loners' with tranquillisers, and awkward high-school dances to entice singles to mingle. As David's days start running out, he decides to feign common interest with a heartless woman in order to escape his fate. But can he pull it off?

Farrell really hits the mark with this role, displaying awkward machismo and fragile humility in equal measure. His comedic timing is matched only by his supporting cast that includes John C. Reilly, Ashley Jensen, and Olivia Coleman. Rachel Weisz is also spot-on as the short-sighted woman.

The Lobster has just about everything you'd want from a film. It's unpredictable, it's offbeat, and it's laugh-out-loud funny. But it's most impressive feature is the subtext - it manages to reflect how odd our own modern-day social pressures are. How loneliness is feared, how individuality loses out to the mainstream system, and how relationships have to be deemed 'legitimate' by some higher order. There's plenty to talk about with this film, and I'll definitely be seeing it again to delve a little deeper....

Seriously, the Lobster is the weirdest movie I have every seen. I love Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz and after seeing such amazing reviews I thought I was going to really be on a winner with this movie. OMG No!! Firstly I didn't laugh once. I felt uneasy and bored. Quite honestly this movie is the biggest waste of time. I'd rather watch the sexual habits of seaweed than this tripe again.

There's no chance that you'll see a film as weird as The Lobster this whole year. In what is effectively an indie art-house piece, you get a completely insane and almost unfathomable world filled with more and more absurdities everywhere you look. However, it's such an incredibly unique and eye-catching film that it's still hugely engrossing and surprisingly entertaining to watch.

The story centres around one man, played by Colin Farrell, as he attempts to find a partner as a part of this bizarre system. The first act revolves around his time in 'The Hotel', and is not only hugely odd, but both dramatic and unnerving as well as hilarious to watch, featuring some of the best dark comedy written in years.

The film takes its story as seriously as any drama, and you feel that through the deeply disturbing atmosphere that emerges off the screen. However, as the film is just so weird, it eases you into the oddness of it all very impressively through the use of humour, something that more pretentious art-house films fail to do, and are resultantly a lot harder to really get into.

So, you'll definitely be laughing a lot, if not in a more disturbed than hugely entertained manner, throughout the first act, and by the end of it, you'll surely be as used as you can be to the incredibly weird feel of this whole film.

Just to give you an idea of how unorthodox this film is, every scene is full of awkward silences, the actors speak as if they're reading off of cue cards with no emotion whatsoever, the imagery is very ugly and unpleasant to look at right the way through, and the incredible slow pace of it all means that the film feels like it goes on for about five times as long as it actually does.

And yet, I still can't get around the fact that this is a brilliant film. Mainly, it's the fact that it's just so unique and almost shockingly bizarre, but it's just filled with so many captivating ideas that it's impossible not to be fully drawn into this insane story.

So, the performances, the directing, the writing, and pretty much everything is stunning, apart from one big issue that prevents this from being a truly incredible film. Following the end of the first act, the film does lose its way quite a lot, taking almost too big a leap into an even stranger abyss than you ever imagined at the beginning, and, with a little less humour in the latter stages, isn't as easy to watch as the first act had been.

However, it does pick up again towards a terrifying and as bizarre as ever conclusion, and that's why I'm going to give The Lobster a 9 out of 10, but I must warn you that if you feel you can't cope with this film for longer than the first twenty minutes, then it's not for you. This is definitely a cult film for the ages, but won't be a big hit with general audiences.

You know how there is pressure to conform, find a partner and live a "normal life"? You know how those who don't conform appear to live unsatisfying lives whilst protesting that they are not? This film takes an hour to say that, then the second hour offers no answers and has an ambiguous and unsatisfying ending.