Greek filmmker Yorgos Lanthimos made a major splash on the international scene with his bold, brilliant, disturbing satire Dogtooth (available on Netflix Instant) and followed it up a few years later, dealing with similar themes, with Alps. Like many acclaimed foreign talents the time to step into English-language territory beckons and for Lanthimos, he’s been hard at work gathering financing for such an effort, The Lobster.
A futuristic dystopian tale, it tracks a town whose single people must find a mate within 45 days or they transform into an animal of their choosing. According to Screen Daily, the cast for the wild-sounding project has now come together, with Jason Clarke (Zero Dark Thirty, The Great Gatsby) set to lead the film and Ben Whishaw (Cloud Atlas, Skyfall), Léa Seydoux (Blue Is The Warmest Color), Olivia Colman (Hot Fuzz), Ariane Labed (Alps) and Angeliki Papoulia (Dogtooth) rounding out the rest of the cast. As we await a few more roles to be set for this highly-anticipated project, check out the synopsis and director’s statement below.
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.
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.
Production begins in March.