I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

T.S. Eliot

The Lobster is basically an extended Monty Python skit blown up into a feature length movie. Initially amusing, it falls apart in the second half. While it benefits from Rachel Weisz’s narration, which somehow combines deadpan comic timing with utter sincerity, and while it does, as Daniel Levine points out, accurately dramatize the contemporary west’s political and cultural malaise, it never quite overcomes being straight jacketed into its high-concept premise.

David, Colin Farrell sporting a “dad bod,” lives in a dystopian society where all adults are required, not only to be married, but to fall in love. Singles are transported to a posh resort in the Irish countryside where they are given forty five days either to find a partner, or to be surgically transformed into the animal of their choice…