We Love ‘Lobster’

Metro-060316-TrailerReview

‘THE LOBSTER’ TRAILER REVIEW BY METRO CREW

After his wife leaves him, David (Colin Farrell) joins all the other single people in his dystopian society: at a hotel, where they must find a partner within 45 days, or else be turned into an animal. There, he stumbles across The Loners, a group of dissenters that reject romance. Among them is a stranger (Rachel Weisz), with whom he forges a connection. This film seems wonderfully weird and we can’t wait to see it. The Lobster opens at Kahala Theatre June 3.

JAMES: This looks like Michael Haneke directed a Charlie Kaufman screenplay — a strange, colorful assortment of characters and situations, played slow and sad. But it’s the first original premise that I’ve seen in a while. I’d check this out.

JAIMIE: I’m still not quite sure how everything connects and there is clearly more to the story than is revealed in the trailer, so I am hooked. You know, I wouldn’t have pegged Colin Farrell as someone who could nail awkward down. Maybe it’s because of some of his earlier movies where he either was half naked and/or trying to be a badass. But it’s working for me. Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz being awkward together is something I can get behind.

CHRISTINA: I agree with you about Colin Farrell. I seriously have hated him in every other role I have seen him in. I’ve always found him so irritating. But he looks so endearing here!

JAMES: This looks like a new trope. The Kafka trope. In these absurdist movies, the protagonist is always a passive milquetoast. Joaquin Phoenix in Her, Philip Seymour Hoffman in Synecdoche, David Thewlis in Anomalisa — things happen to them and they just roll with the punches. Things get weirder, and they just roll over.

CHRISTINA: It seems like they’re setting this movie up to be a comment on the way society encourages couple-dom. Which seems like it will be a funny-because-it’s-true concept — I mean, it’s already hard to buy the right amount of groceries you need as a single person, maybe this reality isn’t far off.

PAIGE: I think rather than discussing the unbearable loneliness of being, the vastly more intriguing question in this film is exactly how this facility turns people into animals and also why this is apparently acceptable all around this presumably utopian-dystopian society. Can this power be used for evil? Do criminals somewhere turn hapless victims into cows and send them to the slaughterhouse? Can the human-turned-animals communicate or are they really animals? So many questions, all much more interesting than the actual movie will be.

CHRISTINA: I feel like these people are not taking it seriously enough. It sort of looks like they’re all just shrugging their way through the whole thing. Like, this is life or death, essentially. If you’re trapped in a hotel with 45 days until you turn into an animal, wouldn’t you be seducing everyone in sight?

JAMES: With 45 days to lick your wounds and find someone new, you’d think the game is rigged. I wonder how many people are left in that world. I wonder if that’s the end of the movie — a dewy-eyed couple clinking glasses on a balcony overlooking a valley; sole survivors in a wilderness of failed romances.