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Quick Answer: In The Lobster, Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos satirizes draconian institutions and the societal pressure to enter into romantic relationships. Lanthimos exposes the absurdity of real-world social norms by re-contextualizing them in a nightmarish dystopian society, juxtaposing the familiar with the strange — a technique that situates the director within the surrealist tradition.

In the dystopian near-future world of The Lobster (2016), it is illegal for humans to exist outside of romantic relationships. All single people are mandated to stay at a seaside resort where they must find suitable partners within 45 days; otherwise they will be transmogrified into the animals of their choice via vague technology. But the clipped manager of the hotel insists that this is nothing to be upset about. “Just think, as an animal you’ll have a second chance to find a companion.” She deadpans this to the newest guest at the hotel, David, who is played by an awkward Colin Farrell with a potbelly and an unfortunate mustache. David is single because his wife has left him. His animal of choice is the lobster.

Colin Farrell in The Lobster (2016)

The Lobster, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ first English language feature, is an absurdist black comedy about the societal pressure to be in a relationship. This is familiar territory for Lanthimos, whose breakout films Dogtooth (2009) and Alps (2011) are off-kilter satires as well. Dogtooth is the story of three siblings imprisoned by their parents at home, who are told they will be ready for the outside world once their “dogteeth” grow in. Alps, on the other hand, follows a group of actors who form a business out of impersonating the deceased for grieving clients. Lanthimos has said that Dogtooth and Alps are opposites — “Dogtooth is the story of a person who tries to escape a fictitious world; Alps is about a person who tries to enter a fabricated world” — but in these films as well as The Lobster, the director creates bizarre fictional situations to comment on the stuff of reality.

Lanthimos’ films could be called surrealist social criticism: he re-contextualizes social norms and rules in seemingly unfamiliar worlds in order to reveal their absurdity. Parents struggling to chain their children to childhood; actors who crave to escape into their roles; single people overpowered by the pressure to be in a romantic relationship. Like Lanthimos has said: “If you distance yourself from [the world], you can realize how absurd some of the things that we consider normal are.”

Angeliki Papoulia in Dogtooth (2009)

The director’s surrealist technique is evident in the human-turned-animal premise of the film — reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis — and even in its title. At the beginning of the film, David (Colin Farrell) decides that if he cannot find a partner during his 45-day retreat, he would like to be turned into a lobster. His reasoning? Lobsters live to be 100, they are blue-blooded (“like aristocrats”), they stay fertile, and at least the human version of David likes the sea. But on another level, The Lobster’s title is most likely a reference to Salvador Dalí‘s 1936 famous surrealist object, “Lobster Telephone,” which has become a kind of emblem of the surrealist movement.

According to 1920s poet André Breton, who wrote the manifestos for the movement, the aim of surrealism is to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality.” Surrealist objects like the “Lobster Telephone” juxtapose items that aren’t typically associated with each other, altering something we perceive as normal into something more unsettling. In the case of The Lobster, Lanthimos extracts familiar aspects of our world — the pressure to be in a relationship, the oppressiveness of social systems — and places them in a fantastical and fleshed out dystopian society, in which flamingos and Shetland ponies roam along the gloomy Irish coast. The resulting world is one that seems everything and nothing like our own: a strange dream that one would suspect holds symbolic significance.

Salvador Dalí‘s “Lobster Telephone”

At the hotel, guests are encouraged to find a mate with whom they have something in common, in the most literal sense. David befriends a limping man and a lisping man (Ben Winshaw; John C. Reilly), who desperately search for partners with disabilities that match their own. Unsuccessful in locating a fellow limper, the limping man ends up self-inflicting regular nosebleeds to feign compatibility with a single woman who clearly suffers from that problem. David uses the same technique and fakes a total lack of empathy to pursue the hotel’s resident “cold heartless bitch” (Angeliki Papoulia), but the relationship ends once she kills David’s dog — his former human brother — and catches him crying. Off-screen, basing a relationship on physical commonalities would be arbitrary, and faking such strong personality traits would seem ridiculous. Perhaps Lanthimos is hinting that in reality, much of the criteria we use to judge romantic relationships is equally as insignificant as a nosebleed; or perhaps he is critiquing the desperate measures people take to secure mates, from dishonest courting techniques to illogical rationalization of compatibility. Probably both.

John C. Reilly (The Lisping Man), Colin Farrell, and Ben Whishaw (The Limping Man) in The Lobster

The sanctity of romantic relationships is not the only object of Lanthimos’ film-joke. In the world of The Lobster, all social systems are draconian and inescapable. When David’s wife in “The City” leaves him for another man, he is immediately sent to the seaside retreat, where he is forced to wear the same uniform as all of the other men, attend pro-couple seminars and dances, and go hunting at night for “loners” — the singles gone rogue who live in the woods on the hotel’s premises. If a guest is caught masturbating, the manager burns his hand in a toaster. If one is caught lying about the premise of his relationship (nosebleed; lack of empathy), he becomes an animal early. David eventually escapes from the hotel and joins the loners, only to discover that their way of life is equally intolerant. He falls in love with one of the loners (Rachel Weisz, who narrates the story coldly), but the dictator of the group (Lea Seydoux) forbids her followers from romance of any kind. If someone is caught kissing, his lips are cut off. If someone is caught having sex, the punishment need not be explained.

Jessica Barden (Nosebleed Woman) and Colin Farrell in The Lobster

In The Lobster, Lanthimos uses surrealist techniques to hilariously satirize the societal obsession with relationships and the absurdity of domineering social systems. He pulls characters and group dynamics out of our own world and places them in a fully realized dystopian society that seems built from a bad dream. The driving force of this humorous nightmare world is not capitalism, but the pursuit of romantic relationships. The film is full of contrasts that blend the normal with the abnormal, leaving viewers somewhere in between: the characters’ monotone voices and deadpan delivery of outlandish dialogue, the humor against the violence, the business-like treatment of romance, the precisely composed shots of a world whose logic makes no sense. In this way, The Lobster is Lanthimos’ own kind of surrealist object: a film that juxtaposes the familiar with the strange, revealing the absurd underbelly of social norms that, after watching the film, will no longer seem normal.