The first thing we see is a woman take a gun into a field and kill a donkey.
Then we watch a group of people being processed at The Hotel. They are given a list of rules. They have their clothes taken away. Then they spend some time talking about what kind of animal they would like to become if they fail to find a suitable partner before the end of their stay. Our hero, such as he is, says he would like to be a lobster. Good choice, he is told, too many people choose things like dogs and cats.
We are never told why the world is the way it is. The people we see are from The City and they visit The City now and then. They are a uniformly cold and heartless bunch. Many of the characters are pure psychopaths. They have no empathy and show no signs of having any emotions at all. Maybe the punchline of The Lobster is that everyone we see started off as an animal and was turned into a human.
The Lobster is a good looking film and I liked most of the actors. But I like a story to make sense. Nothing here makes any sense. For example. One of the rules of The Hotel is that you aren’t allowed to masturbate. One of the daily rituals is a maid dry humping our hero until he has an erection and then leaving as he begs her for a few more minutes.
A suitable partner is one who shares some trivial and meaningless trait, such as having occasional nosebleeds or a limp. But even finding something tiny in common is nearly impossible.
In a world where you either find a partner or you are transformed into an animal, these people are amazingly picking about who they want to spend the rest of their lives with. Our hero is approached by one woman who says she always swallows and doesn’t mind anal. He is unimpressed and ignores her. She later kills herself rather than become an animal.
If this movie was funny, it was lost on me. If it was tragic, that was lost on me as well. There was no one here I cared about. Turn all of these horrid people into lobsters and then cook them.
