The Lobster (2015)

This week has been one of brilliant films with bizarre concepts and today we’re closing out the week with maybe our strangest concept yet.

You could make the argument that this week we haven’t been talking about b-movies, and you’d be correct.

This week is about the films that were inspired by Shlock, but took it to a higher rung.

Ultimately, b-movies were films from an era where you literally had an A-movie and a B-movie. You still see this at any drive-in theater around the world.

They were movies with crazy premises that kept their audiences intrigued enough to stick around, but they weren’t the a-movie, the thing that brought you in.

As a result, they didn’t have the budget of the a-movie, so they’d often look ridiculous or take place in a small handful of locations.

Now let’s look at today's film, The Lobster is a bonkers premise, a world in which we have deemed married folk as essential and anyone over 40 who is unmarried as unessential thus they get transformed into the animal of their choice, that’s an absurd premise. And when speaking about budgetary constraints, the film was made for 4 million dollars, for context Tommy Wiseu’s The Room cost six million dollars back in 2003, when you watch this film from that lens you start to realize you never see them turn into the animals, the film mostly takes place in a mid-tier hotel, and stars mostly (at the time) British character actors, it is about as bare bones as it gets.

But unlike a B-movie, it actually has a lot to say… So let’s talk about it.

This film is a satirical look at our world’s views on romantic relationships taken to the point of mockery towards them.

We live in a society where people feel as though they have an expiration date, they hit a point where they feel if they don’t find someone by some arbitrary number then they will be alone forever or that complete celibacy is the only way you will be motivated to find your partner, or even that you can only be with someone who fits into your exact life circumstances.

This film takes all these absurd cultural beliefs and stretches them to their logical extremes, we feel like we have an expiration date, well what if that’s in forty-five days, you’re gonna settle!

You push away any sexual desire till you find someone who can help you with that problem, you’re gonna settle! You’re only dating pool is other people who have nose bleeds (a real relationship in this film) or also have a limp, you are going to settle!

One of the things I’m most compelled by in this film is the fact that it looks and feels like a classic stuffy British film.

In actuality is a very modern and progressive text.

You hear earlier in the film when Farrell is checking in and being asked his sexuality, he asks if there is a bisexual option and they tell him there is only gay or straight available to him.

As you see in today’s clip you see Olivia Coleman’s manager character tell Farrell that “A camel and a hippopotamus could never be together, think about it, that would be absurd.”

But as I’m sure you astute consumers may know, we are in reality neither camels nor hippopotamus. It is so funny to watch Coleman deliver lines like this, using the same way hateful rhetoric and straw man arguments that are spewed from political writers asking “what is a woman” but in a way that feels so proper.

This is by no means a new issue in the world of the internet, but it has only grown since the film’s release in 2015 so it really is quite impressive to watch the films writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos so eloquently portray this back then.

Guess Monday’s Film