In a parallel universe not too dissimilar from our own, Franz Kafka and Luis Buñuel could have collaborated on writing a manual for dating agencies. The result, purged of any surrealist impulse or dreamlike slippage and condensed into the aseptic prose of a condominium's bylaws, would closely resemble the world of "The Lobster". Yorgos Lanthimos's masterpiece is not simply a film; it is a diagnosis, a ruthless anatomical dissection of our relational neuroses, performed with the precision of a surgeon who has lost all trace of empathy. It is the definitive apologue for the age of Tinder, an allegory so sharp it draws blood.

The premise, now famous, is a stroke of genius in its brutal simplicity: in an unspecified dystopian society, being single is an infraction, a pathological condition to be cured. The “loners” are taken and brought to an isolated Hotel, a sort of sentimental rehabilitation clinic, where they have 45 days to find a soulmate among the other guests. In case of failure, the penalty is not death, but something perhaps more humiliating and Kafkaesque: transformation into an animal of one's own choosing. Our protagonist, David (a magnificently paunchy and subdued Colin Farrell, light-years away from any sort of stardom), chooses to become a lobster. The reasons are pragmatic: they live a long time, are fertile their entire lives, and, he confesses with disarming candor, he “loves the sea.”

It is here that Lanthimos, a standard-bearer for what has been dubbed the “Greek Weird Wave”—a wave of unsettling cinema born from the ashes of the Greek economic crisis, which uses the absurd to comment on the collapse of social and familial structures—orchestrates his first, masterful act. The Hotel is not a gloomy prison, but a purgatory of mediocrity. The decor is anonymous, the clothes uniform, the days punctuated by grotesque rituals: silent breakfasts, awkward dances, and hunting parties in the surrounding woods, where fugitive singles (the “Loners”) are hunted with tranquilizer guns. Each Loner captured earns you an extra day's stay. Survival, therefore, is based on the suppression of the other, on the negation of their very status as an outcast.

The film's language is its sharpest weapon. The dialogue, written by Lanthimos with his creative partner Efthymis Filippou, is a masterpiece of anti-naturalism. The characters speak in a flat, monotone delivery, a sort of emotional Sprechgesang that empties the words of all meaning. Conversations seem to be generated by a defective algorithm attempting to simulate human interaction based on a misunderstood instruction manual. It is the Theatre of the Absurd of Ionesco meeting the laconicism of Bresson, but stripped of any spiritual transcendence. This stylistic choice is not a mere affectation, but the pulsating heart of the film's critique: in a world where being a couple is a legal obligation, love becomes a bureaucratic performance. Compatibility is not based on elective affinity, but on a shared “defining characteristic”: a limp, shortsightedness, a tendency for nosebleeds, a chilling lack of feelings. Love is reduced to an equation, to a box to be checked on a form.

Lanthimos's satire is ferocious because it mimics our own social conventions, taking them to a paroxysm. How many times have we heard “opposites attract,” or, conversely, “birds of a feather flock together”? How many times have dating apps proposed partners to us based on superficial compatibility algorithms? David, in order to survive, pretends to be affectless like the most ruthless woman in the Hotel, in a charade reminiscent of the convoluted survival strategies in the courts of the 18th century. The relationship becomes a social contract based on a lie, an imitation of normality to escape punishment.

But it is in the second act that Lanthimos delivers his checkmate, demonstrating a rare intellectual lucidity. David manages to escape the Hotel and joins the Loners, the resistance living in the woods. One might think that here, at last, individualism and freedom would triumph. But no. The world of the Loners is a mirror image of the Hotel's, and just as totalitarian. If coupling is mandatory there, here it is strictly forbidden. All physical contact is banned, any hint of flirtation punished with grotesque mutilations. The rebels have created a system just as rigid and inhumane as the one they fled. There is no escape from the tyranny of ideology, whether it be that of the couple at all costs or that of forced solitude. Lanthimos's critique is not against marriage, but against any system that presumes to dictate a universal formula for happiness and human existence, transforming the individual into a mere cog in the machine. In this, the film elevates itself to a potent political commentary without ever mentioning politics, much like Don Siegel's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" served as a metaphor for McCarthyist paranoia.

It is in this context of dual oppression that the film's only true love story paradoxically blossoms: the one between David and a shortsighted woman (an extraordinary Rachel Weisz, who is also the narrator, her voice detached and almost documentary-like). Their love is clandestine, an act of pure subversion. They communicate through a secret sign language, a grammar of intimacy built brick by brick against the deadly prose of the two regimes. Their shared “defining characteristic,” their shortsightedness, becomes a tender symbol of their worldview—different, imperfect, and for that very reason, authentic. But in a world that allows for no nuance, their anomaly cannot be tolerated. When the leader of the Loners (a glacial Léa Seydoux) discovers their relationship, she punishes the woman by blinding her, thereby destroying their “compatibility.”

And so we arrive at the ending, one of the most powerful, ambiguous, and discussed in recent cinema. In a diner, the last outpost of an almost forgotten civilization, David sits at a table with his now-blind beloved. To reestablish their symmetry, to be able to love her according to the twisted rules he has internalized, he decides to blind himself in turn. We see him in the bathroom, a steak knife in his hand. The final shot, long and excruciating, is on her face as she waits at the table. We never find out if David goes through with the act. The ambiguity is the perfect coda. Would the act of blinding himself be the ultimate sacrifice for love, or the final capitulation to the system's insane logic? Must love, in order to exist, truly mutilate a part of ourselves? Lanthimos offers no answers, but lets the question dig into us, like a shard of glass in the eye.

"The Lobster" is a work that transcends its time while being a perfect product of it. It is a dark fable that echoes the geometric precision and metaphysical anxiety of a De Chirico painting, the implacable logic of a Kafkaesque nightmare, and the critique of social institutions of a Buñuel. Lanthimos constructs an impeccable visual and narrative architecture, where Thimios Bakatakis's cold, desaturated cinematography and the alienating use of classical music (from Beethoven to Stravinsky) help create an atmosphere of sidereal alienation. It is a film that makes you laugh through gritted teeth, only to then make you feel guilty for having laughed. It is an essential cinematic experience, a painful and brilliant mirror that shows us the absurd and terrible face of our compulsion to conform. And it asks us, in no uncertain terms: what animal would you choose to become? And, more importantly, why?