The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015)

The Lobster offers the premise of a future dystopia, where people who fail to pair up with a partner are turned into animals, as a metaphor for social pressure to choose between either the fully settled married life or hermitdom, when no such argument was really asked for. The bloody-mindedly idiosyncratic Lanthimos ploughs on regardless with his polemic, in much the same style as in his international breakthrough, Dogtooth. All characters speak with autistic, robotic flatness (though with some, such as Ben Whishaw or Léa Seydoux, this probably isn't much of a stretch), voicing platitudes or their literal thoughts, and while this can raise a smirk at its most artificial and incongruous, the effect starts to wear off soon enough.
This is a director who considers, in a curiously old-fashioned manner for one so young, sincerity to be bourgeois and so hides behind artifice and the deadpan covering screen. Then there is also the randomly inserted violence against animals and the schoolboyish insertion of four-letter words into the middle of dialogues, both just for shock effect. The film is more promising when the leads who start falling in love against the conventions of the counter-culture that they have escaped to - where conversely any romantic attachment is punished - are momentarily away from that milieu and there are barbs at decorum, consumerism and oppressive officialdom. But that isn't the focus, and it all ends up being let down for good by the conceit that people are required to be fully matched in some obvious way to be happy. One feels that this is really what the director believes, which places him quite far up the autism scale.

5/10