Lanthimos’ tone is always chilly, devoutly clinical, and bleakly funny, yet full of compassion for his numbed creations. At one point in “The Lobster,” Farrell — who delivers a daring performance that’s a perfectly calibrated, lifeless blank — explains his decision to mate with the Heartless Woman (Angeliki Papoulia, “Dogtooth”) as a path of least resistance. He’s decided that it’s easier to pretend to have no feelings than to manufacture real ones, and he knows that the secret of survival isn’t learning to love, but learning to exist more comfortably with an internal void. Her name a warning in itself, Heartless Woman causes David to bolt for the Loner woods. There, he meets Near-Sighted Woman (Rachel Weisz), and the circle of lovelessness keeps spinning. ... And none of it is all that far from real-world truth. The genuine, human search for love is routinely exploited by the world around us. It spawns bizarrely unreal romantic comedies, Nicholas Sparks novels, terrible hookup apps, “The Bachelor,” colossally expensive destination weddings, weird anti-Valentine’s Day parties, and suicidal songs about breakups where the singer usually asserts that not to have “you” is to “have nothing.” If Lanthimos’ gloom-vision is decidedly more blunt, it’s no less accurate an assessment of every heartless thing human beings already inflict on one another. His is a wild, sad, mordantly funny dystopia, but one that gives sexual desperation the bad name it deserves.

http://www.thewrap.com/the-lobster-review/

THEKILLERWHALE • 6 days ago I saw this about two months ago. This review is pretty accurate except that I feel like it is describing a more enjoyable movie. There were a few genuinely funny moments and a bit of pathos, but, overall, it lacked a lot of the intangibles that make a good film. The deliberately dour atmosphere and awkward human behavior may have had a bit to do with it. I was never truly immersed and wanted it to be done for large parts of the running time. 1 • Reply•Share › Avatar Pinkie Fisticuffs THEKILLERWHALE • 5 days ago So . . . like actually dating.

http://www.avclub.com/review/colin-farrell-goes-full-frumpy-darkly-deadpan-lobs-236504#comment-2672034041

But Lanthimos poses some crazily poetic questions in The Lobster, particularly about what it means to ally yourself with another person. How much of yourself do you give up? What must you hold on to at all costs? And can you ever be sure you’re not making the other person fit just so you won’t be alone?

http://time.com/4327442/the-lobster-movie-review/

The Lobster, though, is downright lunatic from start to finish. It is not a frenetic bit of crazy; Lanthimos’s derangement is most impressive for how restrained and controlled it is. He creates little dioramas in which only the people in his brain could possibly live, and then brings us into those worlds. There’s a lesson in this movie about love, and companionship, and the fear of being alone. But the lesson isn’t nearly as compelling as the vessel Lanthimos uses for its teaching. He’s my favorite beautiful loon.

For such a strange artist, Lanthimos has a lively, mischievous sense of humor, and there’s a scene involving electronic music in the forest that is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in months. But his general subject here is love, and our desperate, often undignified search for it. Lanthimos mocks our need for companionship—which is really just a search for someone like us, or at least someone who can serve our individual needs—by heightening their stakes: Our culture demands coupling up, in Lanthimos’s view, which is just a few steps away from actually demanding it. ... Somehow, unfathomably, Lanthimos turns this into a love story, which saves the sharp-elbowed comedy from curdling into something deeply unpleasant. David might not necessarily find love, but he finds someone who needs him as much as he needs them—which, even if love doesn’t actually exist, is a reasonable facsimile, one that ultimately serves the same purpose. Against all odds, The Lobster ends up becoming a little bit romantic, even hopeful, as embodied by Farrell’s impotent, beaten-down, defeated, yet still somehow full-hearted performance. He makes you believe that, even in the demented universe of this film, there’s still a chance for you. This movie doesn’t have much new to say about love; its insights are far from blinding. But it does show us a new way to think about it

https://newrepublic.com/article/133456/lobster-animal-magnetism-else

Other singletons are exposed as too picky (like the blonde who would rather become a pony than date someone bald) or too much of a pushover (like the woman who wheedles David with cookies and any kind of sex he wants). Naturally, David prefers the Heartless Woman (Angeliki Papoulia), a literal manhunter who helps capture escapees who’ve formed their own screwed-up society in the surrounding forest. The Heartless Woman is a terrifying creation, a combination of your worst psychotic ex and the independent Greek goddess Artemis, and it’s heartbreaking to watch David numb himself to tolerate her cruelty. But Farrell smartly doesn’t play David like a victim — being with the gorgeous killer is his own superficial choice, and he’s fine breaking nicer women’s hearts. Explains David, “It’s more difficult to pretend you have feelings when you don’t instead of pretending we don’t have feelings when we do.” Meanwhile, the established couples who run the camp put on their own show of contentment. They stage plays about the joys of relationships: You’re less likely to get mugged on the street! You’ve got someone to give you the Heimlich maneuver if you choke! And they use their power to visit small indignities upon the single: no tennis, no volleyball, and no, um, self-pleasure. The film has a bleak, deadpan beauty that matches its emotions. Scenes look washed over with a watery gray; the city is mechanical and drab; the woods never see the sun. Then, suddenly, as the camera pans across the trees, we glimpse a rogue flamingo and think, Who was that and what other future did they dream? Most movies make a mockery of love. An action hero spots a passive babe, rescues her from the bad guy, and they live happily ever after. Even romantic comedies are nonsense. They argue that opposites attract, with endless stiletto-heeled uptight girls falling for slackers and changing their whole personality after a powerful kiss.

http://www.mtv.com/news/2879822/the-lobster-movie-review/

Tranquil in manner yet brisk in momentum, it lays out the foreground of the story without pausing to fill in the backdrop; clue by clue, we have to work it out for ourselves.

The irony could not be more acrid: our hero, unable to lose his heart at the hotel, then loses it in the one place where the loss is considered a crime. Only in the city, where David and the woman evade suspicion by pretending to be a couple, do we see them share a writhing smooch, and even then they are told not to overdo it. Wherever you go, Lanthimos implies, the laws entrap you. That is a serious charge, and, for all the pranks that he plays on our assumptions, Lanthimos is full of grave intent. No art, for a filmmaker as for a novelist, is finer or harder than that of keeping a straight face as you hold the world up to scorn. You could easily claim that the film confines its ridicule to the Tinderized—to those who are offered such elaborate assistance in the speed and the precision of their wooing that they are left with no excuse for being alone. The script, by Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou, certainly sports with the notion of the perfect match.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/the-lobster-and-captain-america-civil-war