The Lobster
Yorgos Lanthimos has achieved his greatest critical success and mainstream reach to date with The Favourite, but many people first heard of him thanks to black comedy The Lobster, the Greek filmmaker’s 2015 English-language debut. The Oscar-nominated screenplay offers one of the bleakest and yet weirdly hilarious takes on relationships ever, imagining a world that forces all people to couple up, though there’s also an outsider community of “loners” who aren’t nearly as free as you’d think.
The basic premise—that all humans must have a designated partner or be turned into an animal—is absurd enough on its own, but it gets exponentially weirder once you add in the hotel-resort setting (and adjacent forest, as well as a heavily-policed nearby city) and all of the cruel quirks that continuously crop up in The Lobster—like the fact that humans must share a physical or mental flaw in order to be matched. Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz are perfectly understated as a would-be (and probably should-be) pair who struggle to negotiate their feelings in a world that does everything it can to regulate everything about love. (HBO Max, Kanopy, DirectTV)
