Dogtooth Director Rides A Lobster To The Future
This article is more than 2 years old
Dogtooth director Yorgos Lanthimos isn’t known for making your run of the mill motion pictures. That film is a strange, surreal nightmare, where people escape from a fabricated world, and his last film, Alps, deals with people crafting a place to escape to. For his next trick, Lanthimos is set to turn his unusual sensibilities towards science fiction with a project called The Lobster. If history, and the description are any indication, this is going to be one bizarre, intriguing film to watch.
According to Twitch, The Lobster teams Lanthimos up with screenwriter Efthymis Filippou for a third time, and if the results are anything like the summaries, this should be astounding. The story involves a dystopian future world where humans morph into animals. The director describes The Lobster as an epic style of love story, but you can’t help but think of a darkly fantastic sort of Animal Farm with some sci-fi thrown in to boot.
Here’s what Lanthimos has to say in a statement:
The Lobster is a story about love, without being a conventional love story. It observes the ways and reasons certain people come together to form couples, while others don’t. It is a story about the terrifying effects of solitude, the fear of dying alone, the fear of living alone and, above all, the fear of living with someone. Forcing ourselves to like someone is one kind of suffering; trying to find someone we really like is a different sort of suffering. The Lobster tries to discover synonyms for love in words such as fear, norms, deadlines, matching, synchronicity, naivety, prosperity and lies.
Lanthimos and Filippou plan to start seeking out funding later this month when the International Film Festival Rotterdamn’s CineMarket kicks off. The Lobster’s entry into the official catalog is less theoretical and esoteric than the director’s statement. Though it is no less strange, this should give you a better idea of the actual nuts and bolts plot details of the film.
An unconventional love story set in a dystopian near future where single people, according to the rules of the Town, are arrested and transferred to the Hotel. There they are obliged to find a matching mate in 45 days. If they fail, they are transformed into an animal of their choosing and released into the woods. A desperate Man escapes from the Hotel to the Woods where the Loners live and there he falls in love, although it’s against their rules.
Okay, so now we know what The Lobster is all about, but do you have any idea what the end result is going to wind up looking like? Personally, I have no freaking clue, but given Lanthimos’ track record, and one hell of a unique premise, I’m damn excited to find out.
