The Lobster

The first movement resists the subtractive test almost throughout. Each scene in the Hotel states one statute of the world and pays it out later: the dog that is David’s brother, the choice of animal, the toaster that punishes the Lisping Man, the staged skits in which a man alone chokes and a woman alone is assaulted, the Limping Man’s beaten nose, the hunts that buy days. Even the Biscuit Woman’s fall is the Hotel’s law carried to its end. The second movement is looser. The Loners’ rules must mirror the Hotel’s, but the mirror is shown more often than it needs to be, in the raid on the Manager, the trip to the City, the coded gestures; and no clock replaces the forty-five days. Necessity is high in the first hour and moderate after.

Score: 7.4 / 10

What the film brings into the open can be stated, and it holds. A society that makes coupling the condition of personhood makes love into a matching of traits, and people will mutilate themselves to manufacture a trait in common; the revolt against that order, by forbidding love, becomes the same tyranny turned over. Both halves are one disclosure seen from two sides, and the film refuses the comfort of either. The finding is made through staging as much as speech: the flat delivery shows feeling spoken only as rule, and the Limping Man’s bloodied nose and the closing knife show the cost of the shared trait in the body. Held below the high eights because the condition is drawn in allegory with one joke at its root: the film knows one large thing exactly rather than a society in depth.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The register is deadpan, and its elevations are cold and few. The first hunt, in slow motion through the wet woods to heavy strings, the darted bodies falling in silence, turns comedy into dread. The Heartless Woman’s report of the brother’s death, and David’s walk to the room where the dog lies, is the most frightening scene in the film because no one raises a voice. The Loners dance alone in silence, each to the music in their own headphones. The last shot holds the woman at the table, with the sound of traffic, and cuts before the knife. Height is real in two or three places; between them the tone is held low by intention, and the second movement rises less often than the first. The axis counts frequency as well as height, and frequency is what it lacks.

Score: 7.2 / 10

The film builds as well as evokes. Metamorphosis is load-bearing: the Hotel’s penalty is to be turned into a beast, and the animals in the woods are the failed; Circe’s island and Ovid’s punishments lie beneath it. The pairing to be admitted is Noah’s ark made into a civic order. The flight from the Hotel is an expulsion, and the Loners are an outlaw band of the forest with its own law. The lovers’ secret language of gestures and the blinding of the beloved call up the blind lovers of romance and the self-blinding of Oedipus, which the ending offers and withholds. David’s choice of the lobster, blue-blooded as he says like an aristocrat, is a private myth that turns the joke on him. Held below the bar because these patterns are lent force by the premise rather than grown into a whole structure, and the last blinding is posed, not undergone.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The inheritance is double. First the dystopian allegory and the absurd: Kafka, Ionesco’s beasts in Rhinoceros, Buñuel’s late satires of social rule, and the English-language fiction of the regulated life. Second, Lanthimos’s own manner and that of the Greek cinema of the late 2000s: Dogtooth (2009) and Alps (2011), written with Filippou, had already made flat delivery, arbitrary rule and institutional tyranny into a form. Against the romance and the English-language art film the turn is wide: a love story told as farce, stars dressed down and made to speak without inflection, no score of its own. Against its director’s own path it is a transfer more than a turn, and that part is discounted. The stake was real: a first film in English, with a star cast, in a manner that could have read as affectation.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Change the form and the film stops knowing much of what it knows. The affectless delivery, the narration in a voice that reports cruelty as weather, the symmetrical frames of the Hotel’s rooms and dining hall, the existing music laid over hunts and dances as if over documentary: together they make a world in which feeling can be expressed only as a statement of rule, which is the film’s knowledge. Played naturalistically the premise would be a sketch; played this way, the audience laughs and is then shown that it laughed at mutilation. The two-movement shape is the argument’s shape, a regime and its mirror. Held below the higher figures because the form is fully set in the first act and then repeated rather than developed, and the narrator’s identity, once revealed, is lightly used.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Eleven years of return, so the axis is partly shown and partly forecast. What yields on return: the ending, whose choice is never shown and which divides every audience; the narration, whose speaker changes the meaning of the first half once known; the rules and details that answer across the halves, the Limping Man’s nose and David’s knife, the Manager’s demonstration of the couple and the Loners’ demonstration of the single grave. The film has sustained commentary in criticism and in writing on love and social norms, and is taught as a modern allegory. What limits it is that the central idea is grasped at once and does not much deepen: return finds more detail and more argument about the ending rather than a different film. The manner is consistent, and once seen it is seen.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The field is the cinema of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is a demonstration: the deadpan, rule-bound absurdism of a small national cinema could carry an English-language film with international stars, and a dystopian premise could be played as comedy of manners rather than spectacle. That widens what film can do; it does not reorganise it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Jury Prize at Cannes and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay; wide release in the art houses; and the opening of its director’s English-language career, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Favourite and Poor Things, which carried the register into the mainstream of awards cinema. The flat delivery and the arbitrary-rule premise became a recognisable mode after it, but how much of that is this film’s and how much the later films’ is hard to separate, and that part is discounted.

Score: 7.5 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across eleven years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, in one cut, with nothing lost or replaced. Presence has been continuous and, for an art film of its year, wide: theatrical release in many countries, home video and streaming, steady critical attention, and a presence renewed by its director’s later and larger films, which send audiences back to it. The surface is little fixed to 2015: the Hotel and its rules are placed in no year, the costume and design belong to no decade in particular, and the phones and the dating economy the film satirises are kept off the screen, which protects it. A whole form and good presence earn the upper part of what eleven years can show; the shortness of the span is what holds the axis where it is.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Command of the medium, and in the first movement the making bears weight. Thimios Bakatakis lights by grey Irish daylight and plain interior light, with wide symmetrical frames that hold the guests as specimens. Yorgos Mavropsaridis cuts on deadpan beats, holding a shot past its line until it turns. The music is chosen and placed with care, strings against the hunt. The performances are one discipline kept by a large cast: Colin Farrell, paunched and moustached, makes passivity into a figure; Olivia Colman’s Manager is bright and terrible; Angeliki Papoulia’s Heartless Woman is the coldest presence in the film; Ben Whishaw and John C. Reilly are exact in small roles. What holds it below the eights is the second movement’s pacing, which slackens and repeats, and a visual plainness that serves the film but rarely exceeds it.

Score: 7.8 / 10

One law governs the whole, and the range it holds is wide. Farce and horror, a dinner dance and a killing, a hotel and a forest, a city and its shopping centre, are spoken and shot in one flat key and obey one physics, in which every feeling must be legalised by a rule and every rule is enforced on the body. Take the two most distant elements, the comedy of the toaster and the Heartless Woman’s killing of the dog: both obey that law. So do the Hotel’s ballroom and the Loners’ silent dance, which are the same scene reversed. The narrating voice is in the key of the dialogue, and the coherence holds even where the second movement slackens. What keeps it from the high eights is that the range, wide in tone, is narrow in world: the law is one premise and its inversion, and narrowness is not coherence.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Judged on what a film of about two hours holds. The orders are several and joined by the premise: the state and its law, in the Hotel as an institution; sexuality and the couple; the family, in a brother made into a dog and a child assigned to a quarrelling couple; the body and its mutilation; the natural order, in the woods and the animals that were people; the city and its commerce. They are held by one idea rather than lived in their own right. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or kept shallow: labour, history and the sacred are not there, and consciousness is kept thin by design, since David’s inner life is withheld and the narrator’s is reported. A small form fully held, with no history and no inner life given at depth.

Score: 6.8 / 10