It turns out that Yorgos Lanthimos, the man behind the most complicated (and perhaps most cynical) contemporary film about the vulnerability of dating ... is married. But by his reckoning, a stable relationship doesn’t negate his ability to reflect on the perils of courtship: “You don’t need to be in a war to make a war film,” the Greek director says over the phone from London, where he now resides. The movie in question, “The Lobster,” takes place in an alternate reality, in which single people of a certain age are sent to a resort hotel in the woods, where they are given 45 days to find a partner. If they are unsuccessful, or their partnership is deemed false, they are transformed into an animal of their choosing.Plump and bespectacled David (Colin Farrell) arrives at the hotel with his brother, who has been turned into a dog. The residents must attend daily seminars on the benefits of coupledom. (Case in point: If a single person eating in a restaurant chokes on his food, he’ll die without someone to save him.) In the evenings, residents are handed tranquilizer guns and sent out into the woods, where they are forced to hunt down members of an off-the-grid singles colony, with perks accrued depending on how many they capture. After a first failed attempt at romance on the hotel grounds, David decides to flee, taking his chances with the forest renegades. There, in the one place where coupling is explicitly not allowed, he meets a woman (Rachel Weisz), who seems to be a good match.This is Lanthimos’s first English- language film, and easily his most accessible, but it might also be his most polarizing. That’s saying a lot, considering that his previous films are the family-home-as-prison drama “Dogtooth” (2009), and the even more absurdist “Alps” (2011).Most of the reactions to “The Lobster” during its festival run — it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2015 — have been wildly divergent, and whether one finds it overly sardonic or glimmeringly hopeful may depend on one’s age and relationship status. “The Lobster” flaunts the same lack of emotional definition as Lanthimos’s earlier films; dialogue is comically deadpan, despite an underlying, escalating tension, with moments of extreme violence. “The film asks questions about love, relationships, and the way we organize the world,” he says, somewhat uncomfortable with discussing specific meanings behind the new work. “It’s not about giving an answer.” But one thing is certain — if you have a partner, or a pet, you might look at him or her a little differently after seeing “The Lobster.”
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