The Lobster— Review by Liliean

Review of Lobster

Lilean Buhl

All dystopias take elements of contemporary life and create a world which is constructed with an emphasis on these elements, highlighting their status, their ambivalence in our reality through absurd exaggeration of their meaningfulness. In the bleak world of The Lobster, it is dating, love, and the pursuit of togetherness that gets the treatment. The colors are earthy, the music, if there at all, remains eerie, and the voices defeated --- in The Lobster, what is said (usually ultra-literal commentary) and how it is said (in tone so robotic and vocabulary as detached from human communication as we know possible, such as on the other end of customer-service hotlines or in language-learning videos) is coherently aiming at absurdism through literalness. The actors almost play humans, but not quite. The plot almost makes sense, but not quite. The Lobster is programmatic in its constant, multi-levelled satirizing of love and relationships --- its commentary is so direct, in fact, that it arrives at an accomplished satire in the first five minutes. What follows, however, takes a hundred minutes to tell you the same joke, with the same straight face, a hundred times over. If you loved the joke in the first place, you might make it.