An emotional police state.
It’s certainly true that life becomes easier when you’re in a couple. You both share equal parts of the happiness, revelling in it together and living through ineffaceable memories, and equal parts of the terrible realities that the world has to offer. It’s wonderful to know that you have someone backing you up in your corner, you can let gravity take hold of you, peaceful in the knowledge that you’ll be caught before you hit the ground. Then again, if it isn’t the right person, it can easily become suffocating to be in their company all the time. This affliction even hits the ones who are perfect for each other. Sometimes a bit of space is needed. Better a break than a breakdown as my girlfriend always says.
I’m sat here writing this in an emotionally catatonic state, my nerves completely wrecked and limp after a terrifying argument with my girlfriend last night which left me without any sleep or appetite, so you can best believe that I’m equipped with the perfect frame of mind to tackle this review. This isn’t a film about love, or affection – though there are instances of it throughout – this is a film about coupling up, or rather enforcing people to couple up or else they get turned into animals. You got it, it’s The Lobster (2015). Throwing you into a world where being single is illegal and all single people are sent to an ominous hotel where they have 45 days to find a partner and fall in love, or else they get turned into an animal of their choosing by the end of it. Now that’s one hell of a premise if you ask me. The first and last time I watched this was on a torrential day, some six years ago when it came out in cinemas. I’d say my eye for cinema has focused quite a bit more since then, because damn have I forgotten how fucking brilliant this film is.
The thing that Lanthimos’ films do to you is lull you into a false sense of security. They make you believe that the world on screen operates exactly like our own, but something feels amiss. This lingering insidiousness is not at all attenuated by the camera work. He’s really got a thing for wide-angle lenses on cameras that follow the characters around like a smooth apparition. Everything looks perfect, too perfect, as if this illusion is about to be shattered any moment now. And that’s the trick his films play, they break this comfort with a nasty jolt, but with a subtle nudge, leaving you in a state of gnawing confusion induced by the utter absurdity that becomes unveiled. The Lobster does not at all lack this strange quality. No matter how weird the worlds sound, they’re fully realised and each detail is so meticulously placed that you become implicit in whatever craziness is about to unfold.
Everyone speaks in such a clear monotone voice as if reading into a speech to text generator, giving their presence an odd air. In spite of everyone’s dialogue delivered in such an equalised manner, I could still notice and register the emotions and personalities that separate each character from the next. Their dialogue itself is equally as wild, grappling onto mundane chit-chat which turns from humorously off-beat to demented at the click of a finger. Such banal chatter is given a preternatural edge with how the camera meditates on the characters delivering their lines and ever so slowly zooming in on them. It sure does prevent it from becoming trite or platitudinous because the interest of the camera kept me interested, unbeknownst what sort of unpredictable utterances will spill out of their lips next.
The effect induced by the pairing of music/camerawork and dialogue/camerawork is tantamount. Those moments that I mentioned earlier where the true grotesque horror of the work is unmasked, comes, without fail, with an unsettling violin score. This refrain had an unshakable hold on my spine, for each time I heard it, I knew something terrible or strange was about to happen.
The film hurls you into a world stripped of all its humanity. In those increasingly rare moments where some character may begin to show iotas of humanity, coming out to the surface, the film snuffs it almost immediately. Here humanity is outlawed, made even more apparent by the open ending where such a gesture of humanity is left dangling in my mind whether he went through with it or not.
Comments