The Lobster (2015) Script Review | #81 WGA 101 Greatest Scripts of the 21st Century

A dark comedy that turns romance and relationships into a dystopian societal function, with a distinctive un-Hollywood style.

Logline: In a dystopian near future, single people, according to the laws of The City, are taken to The Hotel, where they are obliged to find a romantic partner in forty-five days or are transformed into beasts and sent off into The Woods.

Written by: Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou

Pages: 87

Number of scenes: 124

The Lobster is in equal measure absurd, disturbing, melancholy, and bitingly funny. It’s well-written, it goes without saying, in order for Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou to pull it off. Like many of the entries on the WGA’s Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century list, the screenplay acts more as a guide for the director— Lanthimos— without all of it necessarily ending up on the screen; that said, the screenplay is quite faithful, and even adds a little more context to what on earth is going on here.

The premise: In a dystopian near-future, all single people are taken to The Hotel in order to find and match with a romantic partner in 45 days, or else they’ll be transformed into animals. It’s like the writers took the horror of speed-dating and somehow found a way to make it extra horrifying. Masturbation, for instance, is forbidden and a punishable offense (it’s not indicated in the script, but in the film, they shove the culprit’s hand into a toaster); the maids perform sad lap dances for the men who haven’t yet found a partner as a reminder of what they are missing; demonstrations are staged to show the virtues of having a partner (these are among the funniest scenes). The goal is that people should find a partner with a shared trait, which is almost superfluous and leads to some extreme measures.

This is the world that David, a middle-aged man, suddenly finds himself in after his wife leaves him. He is taken to the Hotel, along with Bob the dog (which turns out to be his brother, who did not find a partner in the stipulated time). Here, he meets Lisping Man and Limping Man, also in the same predicament. Limping Man is the only one to find a partner, Nosebleed Woman— how? Why, by faking a nosebleed himself! David tries the same, faking sociopathy in order to get with the attractive Heartless Woman but after she cruelly kicks Bob to death, he flees into the woods and joins up with the Loners in the Woods.

Unlike the Hotel, the Loners prove to be both anti-social and diametrically opposed to any sort of romances or relationships. If members break the rule, it’s a punishable offense. This turns out to be problematic because it’s in the woods that David meets Shortsighted Woman (revealed to be the script’s narrator) and their mutual myopia sparks a romance. The Loners also tend to be prey for Hotel guests— if the guests bag a Loner with a tranquilizer, it buys them extra days in the Hotel and prolongs their being turned into an animal.

What stands out in The Lobster is how it breaks the screenwriting convention about having a ‘surrogate’ character that serves as the audience for another to explain the rules of the world. There’s no such surrogate here. Instead, we learn the rules as we go along with David and the others, as the writers cleverly insert moments of exposition without it ever feeling forced, as demonstrated:

And this is how we learn about the purpose for hunting the Loners:

To be sure, David does become our surrogate, plus the Shortsighted Woman’s narration gives us context, especially when he enters the world of the Loners; but to trust the reader to accept what is happening without dumping all the exposition at the beginning takes guts.

Lesson for the aspiring screenplay: You don’t always need a surrogate character, and you don’t need to provide all the necessary exposition right away. Find moments where you can parcel them out in a natural way.

Still, none of this would work without the basic building blocks of storytelling— intention and obstacle— in place. That’s how The Lobster keeps us going along. The first half of the script covers David’s failed efforts to find a suitable partner; in the second half, he does find a suitable partner but the social situation prevents him from being able to enjoy it without putting their lives at risk. The tension in the first half revolves around whether or not David will succeed to find a partner; the tension in the second half is whether he and Shortsighted Woman will get caught, and what will happen then. (Spoiler: They do get caught, and it ends on an ambiguous note).

I call The Lobster dystopian because everything in the world it shows is awful. At The Hotel, finding a partner based on shallow commonalities feels as if romance has been reduced to an algorithm, except instead of a dating app, it’s real life. In the Woods, the Loners are equally oppressive— if The Hotel believes in companionship to an obsessive degree, then the Loners believe in a warped version of individualism in which every man and woman is for themselves, where you aren’t even supposed to help someone in trouble…

Where you dig your own grave instead of expecting others to bury you…

And where you dance on your own.

For a dystopian tale, there is very little emphasis on technology; come to think of it, it’s almost non-existent. The biggest tech in this world seems to be the obscure process of turning humans into animals, and that is neither shown or explained. It also forgoes a traditional story arc of a dissenting minority taking down the oppressive majority; it’s mostly about two people just trying to get by and be happy.

The writing style in The Lobster is worth paying attention to. The descriptions are long; so is the dialogue. But the writing never slows the pace down, and the dialogue has a strange cadence and style that it sells the conviction that this is how people talk in this world. Instead of getting into the weeds of elaborating the world, the writers simply remain focused on the story and creating scenes that provoke an emotional reaction. Lanthimos’ and Filippou’s European style of storytelling permeates the screenplay, forgoing the simplicity and conventions of Hollywood to present something challenging and thoughtful, a story with more questions than answers.

What is The Lobster about, ultimately? Who knows? My take is that it is a rejection of extremes, a depiction of what might happen if we try to centralize the act of relationships and if we go too far into believing in individualism. My take is also that this is an ambitious screenplay that finds laughter, terror and despair in its absurdity, and that it deserved the Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay— it is very original.