Yorgos Lanthimos is not a director to be slept on. 2009’s Dogtooth and 2011’s Alps were both bizarro masterpieces that dealt in the surreal, and his newest film, The Lobster, looks to be no different. Starring Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Léa Seydoux, and John C. Reilly, it’s a film set in the near-future, in which those who don’t find love by a certain age are cursed to transform, for the rest of their lives, into an animal of their choosing. Oh, it also won the Jury Prize at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.
The Lobster finds Farrell in mustachioed quirk mode, as he enters a kind of summer camp for those lost without love. The premise of the camp is this: find love by the end of the allotted time — 45 days — or become an animal. Farrell’s brother has already become a dog; he vows, in time, to become a lobster. Weisz is his love interest, and Reilly is his buddy who, at some point in the film, seems to want to kill him for some reason. Also, it seems that in this future children are things that can be assigned to couples as a form of incentive, which is really only vocalizing a practice that’s been around, unsaid, since the dawn of humanity.
Watch the trailer below. It really is a breath of fresh air, and a reminder after the second season of True Detective (and also Winter’s Tale ) that Farrell has some life in him as an actor. It opens in the U.S. on March 9.