I’m all for originality in new movies because it is usually in short supply.  And yet, some premises are just so odd that they don’t transfer into good cinema — and this year seems ripe for mainstream films trying to be odder than the next.  The Lobster is an international coproduction set in a dystopian future where single people are taken to a hotel and given forty-five days to find a partner or suffer the consequences: to be turned into an animal (of their choice) and let loose in the local woods.  That’s quite a premise for a film, but one that surrealists could probably enjoy.  Unfortunately, I am not a surrealist.

Yorgos Lanthimos (who also co-wrote the script) has his cast underplay the absurdities of the situation in favor of universalizing the loneliness and quiet despair felt by the newly single people who really don’t have much hope to find partners again.  The film follows David (Colin Farrell), who tries to avoid being surgically turned into a lobster (his animal of choice) by courting a heartless woman (Angeliki Papoulia), but that ends very badly for David’s brother.  So he commits a crime and runs away into the woods, only to join a group of people determined to stop the craziness at the hotel — but David finds that the woods people are even more bizarre.

Although this type of absurdist comedy is not really my thing I was with the film until David escapes into the woods.  There, he finds a woman he can love (Rachel Weisz), but he is also controlled by the Loner Leader (Lea Seadoux), and her actions are more cruel than the nutty hotel people.  A couple of jarring scenes of violence also turned me off.  The film attempts to follow through on its strange premise, even to the point of an ambivalent ending, one which can be read in different ways.  But it was less and less funny as it went on, and I grew very tired of the slow pace, the deliberateness of the dialogue, the stilted situations and the cruelty.  Ultimately I think the filmmakers didn’t know where to take the story, and I feel it becomes very muddled.

Would I recommend this?  No, unless you really connect with writers like Kafka, Sartre and Beckett.  I found the film heavy-handed and difficult; the cast is game but no one is seen at their best.  It’s too bad; I was looking forward to something original and kooky, like the Monty Python cast would have produced.  ☆ 1/2.  28 June 2016.