The Lobster

28/09/2025

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Common Characteristics

Imagine a Valentine’s Day double bill of The Lobster and Her, two films that came out within a couple of years of each other, and which could be described as dystopian romances. While the romantic comedy often proposes, so to speak, two problems: how to find the love of your life and how to resolve the complications involved in making it happen when one factors in exes and insecurities, meddlesome parents, and troublesome friends, The Lobster and Her elevate the problem of romance to the ontological level. That is a big word to describe what should be a simple enough emotion, yet the point in using it is that most romantic films contain the romantic within the ready parameters of the dramatic, and do not feel obliged to question too much the status of the humans who are going to get together. In very different ways The Lobster and Her do.
This isn’t an essay in compare and contrast, and we will say only a few words about Her, all the better to concentrate on The Lobster. But what both films do well is question whether we can trust in the codes of romantic behaviour and the principles of the human encounter. Her proposes that we might have to question our presuppositions when it seems Theodore Twombley falls in love with an operating system, and The Lobster wonders if relationships based on common denominators, and where being single is a form of pariah status, leaves us thinking about what this thing love is: something that is a little too taken for granted, no matter the difficulties in finding it. By the end of Her, director Spike Jonze suggests that falling for your mobile phone, no matter how sophisticated a tool it happens to be, is not love. But the feeling generated sails so close to the wind that intense emotional intimacy with OS Samantha might appear a useful substitute for the real thing. These are the sort of questions that have bedevilled both philosophers of romance and writers of pop lyrics. As Bread (and Telly Savalas) sang: ‘If a man could be two places at one time I’d be with you’. Samantha can be in numerous places simultaneously, and says she is with Theodore, even if she is also no less open to virtual assignation with hundreds of others. That old question of the jealous lover: ‘where were you?’ can be answered by the virtual love object as: here, there and everywhere.
The Lobster’s dilemma is a different one, but no less acute in asking us what love and romance happen to be, as it refuses to surf the wave of a viewer’s conventional longings. It wishes instead to ask what underpins them and whether we can trust those feelings and even more, the partner we set up house and home with. In the centre, where David (Colin Farrell) finds himself after he breaks up with his long-term girlfriend, he has to hook up with someone with whom he has something in common, and if he fails to do so after a period time, he will be turned into a creature of his choice: a lobster. People with limps, nosebleeds, headaches, or any other common trait can become a couple as the film offers positivist thinking with dating app functionality. After all, philosophers have puzzled long over the question of other minds, and while someone can say that they love you, this is less categorical than someone with one leg meeting another person also missing a limb. The latter can give to a relationship the oddest of firm footings, but everybody can see that both parties only have one leg. To discern their feelings towards each other is harder to ascertain. It also brings to mind arranged marriages, where others see the parties who will become engaged before the couple has even met.
The Lobster takes these notions and turns them inside out, creating an absurdist form that insists on a theatre of cruelty. When David’s friend at the centre is determined to escape an animal fate, he decides to woo a young woman who suffers nose bleeds. In another environment, this would mean carrying hankies and stemming the blood flow. But here it means John (Ben Wishaw) needs on a regular basis to hammer his face against a table, thus claiming the necessary common characteristic. By the end of the film, David will feel obliged to poke his eyes out so that he can share something fundamentally in common with the woman he now loves. But in a film that isn’t afraid of complications, this is perhaps not only because he wants to share a trait; it is that he shares such a strong empathy with Rachel Weisz’s unnamed character and narrator that he seems willing to blind himself for her. They did actually share a common characteristic (short-sightedness), but they didn’t meet inside the centre but outside of it, after David escaped into the woods in the wake of trying to share his life with a woman who completely lacked the empathy David feigned not to have. She killed his brother (who had become a dog) to find out if he really did have feelings. He did and, in this topsy-turvy world, proved an unsuitable partner for this woman. But joining the people in the woods might not be much better. Any physical or emotional contact with others is strictly forbidden. If anyone is found flirting, punishment is severe. A couple that did so just before David arrived had their lips slashed with a razor and were forced to kiss. It is why the narrator loses her eyes: the loners’ group leader took her in for the op under false pretences. The narrator thought she was rectifying her short-sightedness; the Leader has her blinded. The Leader could see David and the Narrator were just not solitary enough.
Lanthimos says the idea for the film came to him and his co-scriptwriter Efthimis Filippou when they were discussing relationships, ‘’and how it becomes necessary for people to always be in a relationship, and the negative stereotype that we have about those who are single. We as a society seem to downgrade those who are not in a relationship with someone.’’ (Bright Lights Film Journal) It is an extension of the family unit being so important, one that Lanthimos explored in his earlier Dogtooth, and as absurdly as here, which led Mark Fisher, when writing on the film, to quote philosopher Alain Badiiou. Badiou reckoned: ‘‘It is very striking to see as the 20th-century draws to a close the family has once more become a consensual practically unassailable value.’’ (Film Quarterly) Fisher saw that Dogtooth could be read as a critique of the infantalising of adult children who are increasingly now likely to end up living at home longer or at least require familial financial help. But Fisher sees even more that Badiou is right to see the family as full of pathogenic qualities.
       If Dogtooth is an extreme example of the toxic family as the parents have for years convinced their kids never to go out with a perverse series of fictions to keep them at home, in The Lobster this toxicity is extended to friendships and relationships, as if unless they contribute clearly to the generation of a family unit, a human is of little value. Critic Nick Pinkerton mentions the centre manager’s line that ‘‘’Should there be a breakdown in communication between a newly formed twosome, the hotel manager informs them that they’ll be assigned children; that usually helps.’ This got the biggest crowd response at my screening—the laughter of recognition.’’ (Reverse Shot) Friendships here are fragile things. When David is feigning that he lacks empathy, he bumps into the nose-bleeding couple who have a ‘new daughter’, and, since he is with his unempathic partner, he says he has no interest in saying hello to silly little girls. Later, when he has joined the loners, another of his friends from the centre hunts him down – the people in the centre get points for shooting loners with a tranquillizing gun, giving themselves an extra day to find a partner before being turned into an animal. David pleads with this lisping man not to do it, saying he is David’s best friend in the whole world. But when the Narrator stabs the lisping man, David strips him of his clothing, steals his gun, and leaves him in the woods. The narrator knows she has done a terrible thing, not because she has stabbed anyone, but she has helped another human being and this is not what loners do. When another loner gets his foot caught in a trap, he is left for dead as the Leader says he has to make sure he has dug his own grave. Idiomatic terms like these have a very practical function here.
Some might insist that love, compassion and friendship are all very well, but in a perversely pragmatic world, or a technologically advanced one that we see in Her, such terms are of limited application. Yet even if one accepts that such notions aren’t historically transcendent, they might still be humanly necessary to one’s well-being. While the Greeks might have prioritised friendship over love (and broke love down into various categories that would include friendship), Denis de Rougement explored in Love in the Western World its development in Arabic poetry, courtly environs, Arthurian romance, and marital convention. He arrives at the end of the book and speaks of the mid-50s, believing love has reached a position quite distinct from the one Badiou would hold forty years later. He says ‘‘now that marriage has ceased to enjoy the safeguard of a system of social compulsions, the only possible basis on which it can rest is individual choice.’’ Badiou, Fisher and Lanthimos would probably all be inclined to agree that Rougement underestimated the coercive aspect of society. Whatever the gains made in the post-war years in sexual liberation, and the millennial opportunities for far greater sexual identification, backlashes are usually around the corner, and people’s inner conservatism is willing to come out. But a conservative might insist that while promiscuity or non-binary sexual choices are all very well, they aren’t that useful when you want to reproduce your population. (And why many on the right spend so much time now talking about demographics.)
To explore this in detail would open up the debate far beyond a short essay, even if Lanthimos said of making the film, ‘‘I just think it’s interesting to start a dialogue.” (BFI) But what Lanthimos provocatively examines are two options that seem increasingly prominent: an algorithmic conformism that insists a dating website will help you find the perfect match, and an incel acceptance that solitude is a fact of life because people simply won’t put out on your say so. An online dater, Albert Fax Cahn noted that ‘‘Filtering was frustrating. As I looked for matches, the list seemed both too broad and too narrow. Take religion. I didn't care which faith they listed. What I cared about was their empathy and openness to my own strange mix of secularism, Judaism, and ambivalent agnosticism. But there's no checkbox for curiosity and kindness. Often, what mattered most to me (intellect, humor, and nerdiness) fell outside Match's categories.’’ (Business Insider) The system was far less flexible than life. In a fine piece, Amia Srinivasan quotes killer Elliot Rodger, who reckoned, ‘‘I was cast out and rejected, forced to endure an existence of loneliness and insignificance, all because the females of the human species were incapable of seeing the value in me.’’ Srinivasan adds that ‘’Feminist commentators were quick to point out what should have been obvious: that no woman was obligated to have sex with Rodger; that his sense of sexual entitlement was a case-study in patriarchal ideology.’’ (London Review of Books) He, of course, turned murderous; the ultimate in rejecting the presence of the other. If Cahn realised he wanted more flexibility and a person who could meet his subjective demands as he would hopefully meet hers, Rodger seemed to believe that, as a single person, someone should have felt obliged to have sex with him.
Lanthimos’s film may coincide with such perspectives, but he illuminates them not through sociological specificity, but metaphoric affectivity. He rejects realism all the better to comprehend the poles of the solitary and sociable. As the lisping man points the gun at him, David says ‘it is really nice to be on your own, with no one tying you down. You listen to music whenever you like, you masturbate whenever you want, go for walks whenever you like.’ But of course, in his new environment, any hint of intimacy or fellow-feeling is a punishable offence. The film might often seem inexplicable in its emotional milieu, but comprehensible in its underlying wish to understand the absurdities we may be living by. This allows Lanthimos to be weak in his world-building and strong on propositional possibility. When asked about its S/F aspects, he reckoned, ‘‘My story doesn’t necessarily need to be set in the future; it could just be an alternate world, a world like we have now but with different rules.’’ (Bright Lights Film Journal) Clearly, many a work of the imagination wants at the same time to comment on the world out of which it comes. No matter how much it defies the laws of physics, a fantasy film will still likely appeal to primary emotions and first principles, focusing on anger and frustration, aggression and love, justice and power, ambition and greed. All of these will be recognisable, no matter if there are dragons and unicorns, flying cars or an apocalyptic society. Great examples of cinematic world-building include Blade Runner, 2001, Lord of the Rings and Labyrinth. But Lanthimos’ work is more subjective than subjunctive, more inclined to look askew than look anew. Like a lot of suggestive literature that is neither quite fantasy, nor science fiction (work by Kafka, Borges, Kawabata and Calvino), it doesn’t quite propose a fully realised alternate reality. It uses the absurd to fish out preoccupations of our moment.This could have made the film merely fashionable, yet that would have been so if the analogies we have proposed were as temporary as we might have hoped some of them to be. However, while a hundred years ago the remark about kids allowing parents to focus their attention on them, instead of squabbling amongst themselves, wouldn’t probably have got the biggest laugh, suggesting the film is timely rather than timeless, we sense that Lanthimos is exploring a problem that isn’t going away soon. When we invoked the arranged marriage, this is something very old indeed, while online dating is chiefly a 21st-century phenomenon. However, what Lanthimos explores can perhaps best be explained in what seems like a contradiction. Interviewing Lanthimos, Amir Ganjavie wonders whether the film seems to contradict itself when it suggests that initially characters end up in the hotel as non-conformists, and see partnering up as oppressive, yet this is what David and the narrator want to do by the end of the film. Is the film’s initial mockery countered by its later claim? Lanthomos reckons this needn’t be inconsistent because ‘‘the people don’t go to the hotel because they don’t follow the rules – they might. Instead, someone who breaks up with his wife, like our hero, must go to the hotel in order to find someone – that’s the rule.’’ (Bright Lights Film Journal) Yet even if the film might seem to propose that partnering up is a joke, it also indicates that solitude is no better if equally enforced. The contradiction is more a paradox that can be resolved with a proper affect – love.
Love may not conquer all, but it can offset the atrophication of feeling that both obligatory relationships and mandatory solitude demand. If David finds himself escaping the compound only to discover no less rigid rules in the open, then the film would merely be proposing that there would be choice, but not really options. Love (vague and indeterminate as it is) becomes the possible within what seems like the impossible. However, Lanthimos also suggests while he has resolved the binary coupledom/solitude problem, he is still left with the potential complications in the couple that the binary system has no interest in entertaining. If the film can seem weak on its world-building, it is chiefly because The Lobster keeps exploring its internal logic over the externals of mise en scene. David and the Narrator no longer have the common characteristic of short-sightedness, and so will David take out his own eyes to match the Narrator’s blindness? Pragmatically, he will be doing so as they can live in the city together, sharing sightlessness. But while that might be the ostensible motive for the deed, it contains within it all the complications of love as risk. If falling in love is often seen as a leap of faith that arranged marriages and dating websites try and alleviate by suggesting emotional disinterestedness or objective criteria, then what sacrifice is one willing to make for another without knowing exactly what underpins that renunciation?
On a strict level, there isn’t much of a difference between John’s self-administered nose bleeds and David deciding whether to stick a knife into his eyes. However, this isn’t only that David is upping the ante as Lanthimos puts the viewer through a few seconds of gruelling discomfort as we wait and see if he will do the deed. That is part of the film’s theatre of cruelty, no doubt. It is also, though, that while John was willing to hurt himself, fully aware of the consequences and the rewards, David cannot do so with the same confidence, and Lanthimos reflects this inevitable ambivalence not with a hard cut administered to David’s eye, but a hard cut cinematically to ours.
       The moment before David will or will not blind himself, Lanthimos shows us The Narrator seated in the roadside cafe awaiting his return. The film ends on a productive ambiguity that offers two things at once. One concerns whether things in common are a useful way to go, as it pushes such a notion into reductio ad absurdum. This is timely. The other, what is the depth of our sacrifice to a person we love? This is closer to the timeless, and while the latter problem has hardly gone away, the former might wish to eradicate it in a quantitative dystopia that flattens out feeling. The latter perhaps accepts it in what might be a terrible moment of self-harm that meets the needs of selflessness. The film remains moot on this and ends with us escaping the discomfort of seeing David poke out his eyes, but with the discomfort of knowing we live in a world of complicated emotions. The conformist expectation or abrasive solitude seem weak and appalling answers to this ontological question of love and being. Yet the film has provocatively indicated that, if we are not careful, they might become the only options.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Lobster

Common Characteristics

Imagine a Valentine’s Day double bill of The Lobster and Her, two films that came out within a couple of years of each other, and which could be described as dystopian romances. While the romantic comedy often proposes, so to speak, two problems: how to find the love of your life and how to resolve the complications involved in making it happen when one factors in exes and insecurities, meddlesome parents, and troublesome friends, The Lobster and Her elevate the problem of romance to the ontological level. That is a big word to describe what should be a simple enough emotion, yet the point in using it is that most romantic films contain the romantic within the ready parameters of the dramatic, and do not feel obliged to question too much the status of the humans who are going to get together. In very different ways The Lobster and Her do.
This isn’t an essay in compare and contrast, and we will say only a few words about Her, all the better to concentrate on The Lobster. But what both films do well is question whether we can trust in the codes of romantic behaviour and the principles of the human encounter. Her proposes that we might have to question our presuppositions when it seems Theodore Twombley falls in love with an operating system, and The Lobster wonders if relationships based on common denominators, and where being single is a form of pariah status, leaves us thinking about what this thing love is: something that is a little too taken for granted, no matter the difficulties in finding it. By the end of Her, director Spike Jonze suggests that falling for your mobile phone, no matter how sophisticated a tool it happens to be, is not love. But the feeling generated sails so close to the wind that intense emotional intimacy with OS Samantha might appear a useful substitute for the real thing. These are the sort of questions that have bedevilled both philosophers of romance and writers of pop lyrics. As Bread (and Telly Savalas) sang: ‘If a man could be two places at one time I’d be with you’. Samantha can be in numerous places simultaneously, and says she is with Theodore, even if she is also no less open to virtual assignation with hundreds of others. That old question of the jealous lover: ‘where were you?’ can be answered by the virtual love object as: here, there and everywhere.
The Lobster’s dilemma is a different one, but no less acute in asking us what love and romance happen to be, as it refuses to surf the wave of a viewer’s conventional longings. It wishes instead to ask what underpins them and whether we can trust those feelings and even more, the partner we set up house and home with. In the centre, where David (Colin Farrell) finds himself after he breaks up with his long-term girlfriend, he has to hook up with someone with whom he has something in common, and if he fails to do so after a period time, he will be turned into a creature of his choice: a lobster. People with limps, nosebleeds, headaches, or any other common trait can become a couple as the film offers positivist thinking with dating app functionality. After all, philosophers have puzzled long over the question of other minds, and while someone can say that they love you, this is less categorical than someone with one leg meeting another person also missing a limb. The latter can give to a relationship the oddest of firm footings, but everybody can see that both parties only have one leg. To discern their feelings towards each other is harder to ascertain. It also brings to mind arranged marriages, where others see the parties who will become engaged before the couple has even met.
The Lobster takes these notions and turns them inside out, creating an absurdist form that insists on a theatre of cruelty. When David’s friend at the centre is determined to escape an animal fate, he decides to woo a young woman who suffers nose bleeds. In another environment, this would mean carrying hankies and stemming the blood flow. But here it means John (Ben Wishaw) needs on a regular basis to hammer his face against a table, thus claiming the necessary common characteristic. By the end of the film, David will feel obliged to poke his eyes out so that he can share something fundamentally in common with the woman he now loves. But in a film that isn’t afraid of complications, this is perhaps not only because he wants to share a trait; it is that he shares such a strong empathy with Rachel Weisz’s unnamed character and narrator that he seems willing to blind himself for her. They did actually share a common characteristic (short-sightedness), but they didn’t meet inside the centre but outside of it, after David escaped into the woods in the wake of trying to share his life with a woman who completely lacked the empathy David feigned not to have. She killed his brother (who had become a dog) to find out if he really did have feelings. He did and, in this topsy-turvy world, proved an unsuitable partner for this woman. But joining the people in the woods might not be much better. Any physical or emotional contact with others is strictly forbidden. If anyone is found flirting, punishment is severe. A couple that did so just before David arrived had their lips slashed with a razor and were forced to kiss. It is why the narrator loses her eyes: the loners’ group leader took her in for the op under false pretences. The narrator thought she was rectifying her short-sightedness; the Leader has her blinded. The Leader could see David and the Narrator were just not solitary enough.
Lanthimos says the idea for the film came to him and his co-scriptwriter Efthimis Filippou when they were discussing relationships, ‘’and how it becomes necessary for people to always be in a relationship, and the negative stereotype that we have about those who are single. We as a society seem to downgrade those who are not in a relationship with someone.’’ (Bright Lights Film Journal) It is an extension of the family unit being so important, one that Lanthimos explored in his earlier Dogtooth, and as absurdly as here, which led Mark Fisher, when writing on the film, to quote philosopher Alain Badiiou. Badiou reckoned: ‘‘It is very striking to see as the 20th-century draws to a close the family has once more become a consensual practically unassailable value.’’ (Film Quarterly) Fisher saw that Dogtooth could be read as a critique of the infantalising of adult children who are increasingly now likely to end up living at home longer or at least require familial financial help. But Fisher sees even more that Badiou is right to see the family as full of pathogenic qualities.
       If Dogtooth is an extreme example of the toxic family as the parents have for years convinced their kids never to go out with a perverse series of fictions to keep them at home, in The Lobster this toxicity is extended to friendships and relationships, as if unless they contribute clearly to the generation of a family unit, a human is of little value. Critic Nick Pinkerton mentions the centre manager’s line that ‘‘’Should there be a breakdown in communication between a newly formed twosome, the hotel manager informs them that they’ll be assigned children; that usually helps.’ This got the biggest crowd response at my screening—the laughter of recognition.’’ (Reverse Shot) Friendships here are fragile things. When David is feigning that he lacks empathy, he bumps into the nose-bleeding couple who have a ‘new daughter’, and, since he is with his unempathic partner, he says he has no interest in saying hello to silly little girls. Later, when he has joined the loners, another of his friends from the centre hunts him down – the people in the centre get points for shooting loners with a tranquillizing gun, giving themselves an extra day to find a partner before being turned into an animal. David pleads with this lisping man not to do it, saying he is David’s best friend in the whole world. But when the Narrator stabs the lisping man, David strips him of his clothing, steals his gun, and leaves him in the woods. The narrator knows she has done a terrible thing, not because she has stabbed anyone, but she has helped another human being and this is not what loners do. When another loner gets his foot caught in a trap, he is left for dead as the Leader says he has to make sure he has dug his own grave. Idiomatic terms like these have a very practical function here.
Some might insist that love, compassion and friendship are all very well, but in a perversely pragmatic world, or a technologically advanced one that we see in Her, such terms are of limited application. Yet even if one accepts that such notions aren’t historically transcendent, they might still be humanly necessary to one’s well-being. While the Greeks might have prioritised friendship over love (and broke love down into various categories that would include friendship), Denis de Rougement explored in Love in the Western World its development in Arabic poetry, courtly environs, Arthurian romance, and marital convention. He arrives at the end of the book and speaks of the mid-50s, believing love has reached a position quite distinct from the one Badiou would hold forty years later. He says ‘‘now that marriage has ceased to enjoy the safeguard of a system of social compulsions, the only possible basis on which it can rest is individual choice.’’ Badiou, Fisher and Lanthimos would probably all be inclined to agree that Rougement underestimated the coercive aspect of society. Whatever the gains made in the post-war years in sexual liberation, and the millennial opportunities for far greater sexual identification, backlashes are usually around the corner, and people’s inner conservatism is willing to come out. But a conservative might insist that while promiscuity or non-binary sexual choices are all very well, they aren’t that useful when you want to reproduce your population. (And why many on the right spend so much time now talking about demographics.)
To explore this in detail would open up the debate far beyond a short essay, even if Lanthimos said of making the film, ‘‘I just think it’s interesting to start a dialogue.” (BFI) But what Lanthimos provocatively examines are two options that seem increasingly prominent: an algorithmic conformism that insists a dating website will help you find the perfect match, and an incel acceptance that solitude is a fact of life because people simply won’t put out on your say so. An online dater, Albert Fax Cahn noted that ‘‘Filtering was frustrating. As I looked for matches, the list seemed both too broad and too narrow. Take religion. I didn't care which faith they listed. What I cared about was their empathy and openness to my own strange mix of secularism, Judaism, and ambivalent agnosticism. But there's no checkbox for curiosity and kindness. Often, what mattered most to me (intellect, humor, and nerdiness) fell outside Match's categories.’’ (Business Insider) The system was far less flexible than life. In a fine piece, Amia Srinivasan quotes killer Elliot Rodger, who reckoned, ‘‘I was cast out and rejected, forced to endure an existence of loneliness and insignificance, all because the females of the human species were incapable of seeing the value in me.’’ Srinivasan adds that ‘’Feminist commentators were quick to point out what should have been obvious: that no woman was obligated to have sex with Rodger; that his sense of sexual entitlement was a case-study in patriarchal ideology.’’ (London Review of Books) He, of course, turned murderous; the ultimate in rejecting the presence of the other. If Cahn realised he wanted more flexibility and a person who could meet his subjective demands as he would hopefully meet hers, Rodger seemed to believe that, as a single person, someone should have felt obliged to have sex with him.
Lanthimos’s film may coincide with such perspectives, but he illuminates them not through sociological specificity, but metaphoric affectivity. He rejects realism all the better to comprehend the poles of the solitary and sociable. As the lisping man points the gun at him, David says ‘it is really nice to be on your own, with no one tying you down. You listen to music whenever you like, you masturbate whenever you want, go for walks whenever you like.’ But of course, in his new environment, any hint of intimacy or fellow-feeling is a punishable offence. The film might often seem inexplicable in its emotional milieu, but comprehensible in its underlying wish to understand the absurdities we may be living by. This allows Lanthimos to be weak in his world-building and strong on propositional possibility. When asked about its S/F aspects, he reckoned, ‘‘My story doesn’t necessarily need to be set in the future; it could just be an alternate world, a world like we have now but with different rules.’’ (Bright Lights Film Journal) Clearly, many a work of the imagination wants at the same time to comment on the world out of which it comes. No matter how much it defies the laws of physics, a fantasy film will still likely appeal to primary emotions and first principles, focusing on anger and frustration, aggression and love, justice and power, ambition and greed. All of these will be recognisable, no matter if there are dragons and unicorns, flying cars or an apocalyptic society. Great examples of cinematic world-building include Blade Runner, 2001, Lord of the Rings and Labyrinth. But Lanthimos’ work is more subjective than subjunctive, more inclined to look askew than look anew. Like a lot of suggestive literature that is neither quite fantasy, nor science fiction (work by Kafka, Borges, Kawabata and Calvino), it doesn’t quite propose a fully realised alternate reality. It uses the absurd to fish out preoccupations of our moment.This could have made the film merely fashionable, yet that would have been so if the analogies we have proposed were as temporary as we might have hoped some of them to be. However, while a hundred years ago the remark about kids allowing parents to focus their attention on them, instead of squabbling amongst themselves, wouldn’t probably have got the biggest laugh, suggesting the film is timely rather than timeless, we sense that Lanthimos is exploring a problem that isn’t going away soon. When we invoked the arranged marriage, this is something very old indeed, while online dating is chiefly a 21st-century phenomenon. However, what Lanthimos explores can perhaps best be explained in what seems like a contradiction. Interviewing Lanthimos, Amir Ganjavie wonders whether the film seems to contradict itself when it suggests that initially characters end up in the hotel as non-conformists, and see partnering up as oppressive, yet this is what David and the narrator want to do by the end of the film. Is the film’s initial mockery countered by its later claim? Lanthomos reckons this needn’t be inconsistent because ‘‘the people don’t go to the hotel because they don’t follow the rules – they might. Instead, someone who breaks up with his wife, like our hero, must go to the hotel in order to find someone – that’s the rule.’’ (Bright Lights Film Journal) Yet even if the film might seem to propose that partnering up is a joke, it also indicates that solitude is no better if equally enforced. The contradiction is more a paradox that can be resolved with a proper affect – love.
Love may not conquer all, but it can offset the atrophication of feeling that both obligatory relationships and mandatory solitude demand. If David finds himself escaping the compound only to discover no less rigid rules in the open, then the film would merely be proposing that there would be choice, but not really options. Love (vague and indeterminate as it is) becomes the possible within what seems like the impossible. However, Lanthimos also suggests while he has resolved the binary coupledom/solitude problem, he is still left with the potential complications in the couple that the binary system has no interest in entertaining. If the film can seem weak on its world-building, it is chiefly because The Lobster keeps exploring its internal logic over the externals of mise en scene. David and the Narrator no longer have the common characteristic of short-sightedness, and so will David take out his own eyes to match the Narrator’s blindness? Pragmatically, he will be doing so as they can live in the city together, sharing sightlessness. But while that might be the ostensible motive for the deed, it contains within it all the complications of love as risk. If falling in love is often seen as a leap of faith that arranged marriages and dating websites try and alleviate by suggesting emotional disinterestedness or objective criteria, then what sacrifice is one willing to make for another without knowing exactly what underpins that renunciation?
On a strict level, there isn’t much of a difference between John’s self-administered nose bleeds and David deciding whether to stick a knife into his eyes. However, this isn’t only that David is upping the ante as Lanthimos puts the viewer through a few seconds of gruelling discomfort as we wait and see if he will do the deed. That is part of the film’s theatre of cruelty, no doubt. It is also, though, that while John was willing to hurt himself, fully aware of the consequences and the rewards, David cannot do so with the same confidence, and Lanthimos reflects this inevitable ambivalence not with a hard cut administered to David’s eye, but a hard cut cinematically to ours.
       The moment before David will or will not blind himself, Lanthimos shows us The Narrator seated in the roadside cafe awaiting his return. The film ends on a productive ambiguity that offers two things at once. One concerns whether things in common are a useful way to go, as it pushes such a notion into reductio ad absurdum. This is timely. The other, what is the depth of our sacrifice to a person we love? This is closer to the timeless, and while the latter problem has hardly gone away, the former might wish to eradicate it in a quantitative dystopia that flattens out feeling. The latter perhaps accepts it in what might be a terrible moment of self-harm that meets the needs of selflessness. The film remains moot on this and ends with us escaping the discomfort of seeing David poke out his eyes, but with the discomfort of knowing we live in a world of complicated emotions. The conformist expectation or abrasive solitude seem weak and appalling answers to this ontological question of love and being. Yet the film has provocatively indicated that, if we are not careful, they might become the only options.

© Tony McKibbin