This isn’t a society of nuance or compromise. Everything is meant to be black and white: the characters are in a relationship or they’re miserable, they’re compliant or brutalized.” (Robinson, 2016)
The Lobster introduces us to its harsh, oppressive premises through dramatically uniform, isolating spaces. For a narrative plagued by disjointedness and flat-affect, it is only fitting that the spaces these characters inhabit echo this sterility, emerging as characters in their own right.
From a glance, many of the Hotel’s communal spaces are veiled with an apparent grandeur, reflecting the black and white rigidity that characterises the film. Yet, even the Hotel’s strikingly ornate spaces are paradoxically pervaded with this stiffness; the vast ballroom is imposed upon with school-like rows of tables, sandwiching the guests into the sickly warm “social” event.
So explicitly conducive to behaviour, that the space seems to work with the staff; a draconian figure orchestrating grand social events of little substance, hosting these elaborately unnatural situations to allow us to question what is natural.
And yet, in a moment of dissidence, the Hotel’s order is destabilised; both David and the hotel worker are resensitised and their compassion prevails, and within the panic and haste, suddenly the shades of grey emerge through this previously unseen space.
Architecturally, the offset door and imbalanced structural features, tied together with a disproportionately magnificent skylight capture the nuance that is abandoned by this society, visually hinting towards the dissolution of this society’s distorted axioms.
As the architecture transitions, so too does the narrative: within this moment, the incoherence of characters’ emotions and actions is broken with a glimpse of their humanity. In its spareness, David and the Hotel worker are granted the space to question, to defy their roles in a system that has rendered them complacent.
Finally, the pace picks up, and where emotions are otherwise isolated from behaviour we experience their sense of concurrence, as their awareness visibly guides their actions. Despite dragging the heartless woman into the transformation room, in this moment it is David who is transforming.
Robinson, T. (May 17, 2016), “The Lobster draws out an illogical world to its most logical ends”, The Verge, https:// www.theverge.com/2016/5/17/11686442/the-lobster-movie-review-colin-farrell-rachel-weisz