The Lobster
A24 | Release Date: May 13, 2016 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
82
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 44 Critic Reviews
Positive:
40
Mixed:
4
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallJun 1, 2016
The Lobster remains strangely romantic throughout, an absurdist take on the notion that great love stories — Casablanca, The Way We Were, Gone With the Wind — don't always end tidily. Read full review
100
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaMay 25, 2016
The Lobster is what would happen if Wes Anderson set about doing Franz Kafka, with a hefty dash of George Orwell thrown into the mix: surreal, comic, sad, strange, beautiful, sublime. Read full review
100
Entertainment WeeklyChris NashawatyMay 12, 2016
If you’re willing to surrender to his singular vision, you might just walk out of the theater seeing the world in a new way — which is probably more than you can expect from the new Kevin Hart comedy. Read full review
100
The New York TimesA.O. ScottMay 12, 2016
Cruelty and humor are nestled like spoons in a drawer. Mr. Lanthimos’s method is to elicit an appreciative chuckle followed by a gasp of shock, and to deliver violence and whimsy in the same even tone. “The Lobster” is often startlingly funny in the way it proposes its surreal conceits, and then upsettingly grim in the way it follows through on them. Read full review
100
VarietyGuy LodgeMay 16, 2015
A wickedly funny protest against societal preference for nuclear coupledom that escalates, by its own sly logic, into a love story of profound tenderness and originality. Read full review
100
The PlaylistOliver LytteltonMay 15, 2015
In the end, all the strangeness adds up towards something genuinely significant: an atypically rich and substantial comedy that's stuffed with great scenes and performances even before you start to chew on its bigger questions. Read full review
91
IndieWireEric KohnMay 15, 2015
Though at times almost too peculiar for its own good, The Lobster brings Lanthimos' distinct blend of morbid, deadpan humor and surrealism to a broader canvas without compromising his ability to deliver another thematically rich provocation. Read full review
90
ScreenCrushBritt HayesMay 24, 2016
A movie that explores the full spectrum of relationships with impeccable wit, delightfully dark humor and insights so sharp they verge on deadly. Read full review
90
TheWrapDave WhiteMay 13, 2016
If Lanthimos’ gloom-vision is decidedly more blunt, it’s no less accurate an assessment of every heartless thing human beings already inflict on one another. His is a wild, sad, mordantly funny dystopia, but one that gives sexual desperation the bad name it deserves. Read full review
90
NPRBob MondelloMay 13, 2016
If weird is what you're looking for, The Lobster is, claws down, the rom-com of the year (though possibly not one you'd want to choose for a first date). Read full review
90
Village VoiceMichael NordineMay 11, 2016
Lanthimos's consistently hilarious, borderline anti-humor slowly gives way to a romantic streak of surprising warmth. Read full review
90
The Hollywood ReporterLeslie FelperinMay 16, 2015
A richly rewarding but often very disturbing, even harrowing work. Read full review
88
Charlotte ObserverLawrence ToppmanJun 2, 2016
Lanthimos and Filippou have thoroughly imagined their world. Read full review
88
St. Louis Post-DispatchCalvin WilsonJun 2, 2016
If you’re open to embracing a film that declines to pander to expectations, you should definitely make a date with The Lobster. Read full review
88
Miami HeraldRene RodriguezJun 2, 2016
Another strange, sometimes harrowing exercise in absurdity that resonates despite its weirdness. Read full review
88
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsMay 20, 2016
Everything within the film connects to neighboring elements, performance to performance to cryptic absurdity (the opening is one of the strangest of the year) to surprisingly heartfelt acknowledgment of the power of love. Whether things work out or not. Read full review
88
Boston GlobePeter KeoughMay 19, 2016
Another thing that might bug people is the acting. The roles are performed almost devoid of affect, something like the characters voiced by Tom Noonan in “Anomalisa.” Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comSheila O'MalleyMay 13, 2016
The Lobster plays rigorously by its own rules without once telegraphing "Just kidding!" While extremely funny, it is a bitter and ruthless film. Lanthimos plays target practice and his aim is deadly. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter TraversMay 12, 2016
The Lobster, with a score that samples everyone from Beethoven to Nick Cave, comes at you with images that burn and laughs that stick in the throat. Take the challenge of this movie — it'll keep you up nights. Read full review
84
The VergeTasha RobinsonJun 3, 2016
It's a cynical look not just at society and its structures and strictures, but at love itself. But it's still mesmerizing in its oddity, and it's exceptionally daring. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd May 11, 2016
Bizarre rules and rituals, deliberately stilted dialogue, flashes of grisly violence that threaten to tilt the humor straight into horror: All of this could only have come from the warped imagination of Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, here making his singularly strange English-language debut. Read full review
83
The Film StageGiovanni Marchini CamiaFeb 12, 2016
The Lobster, takes on the rigid preconceptions surrounding relationships. Read full review
83
ConsequenceMichael RoffmanJan 24, 2016
The Greek filmmaker builds a stunning world with The Lobster, and much of its success stems from the inherent mechanics and the less-is-more storytelling that drops empty spaces for the mind to paint. Read full review
83
HitfixGregory EllwoodMay 22, 2015
Lanthimos presents a fully formed original vision that hits a perfect tone even when the narrative begins to get away from him a bit. Read full review
80
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottJun 2, 2016
This is the kind of movie that almost begs for a second viewing, which, admittedly, isn't always a good thing. In the case of The Lobster, however, it is. It's a very good thing -- good and weird and wonderful. Read full review
80
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzMay 19, 2016
Lanthimos makes statements about the nature of love and relationships and their place in society, and there are fewer statements more important than those. Read full review
80
TimeStephanie ZacharekMay 16, 2016
Somehow, it works, thanks largely to Farrell. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangMay 12, 2016
It’s a wondrously silly premise, and one that Lanthimos, not unlike those great cine-surrealists Luis Buñuel and Charlie Kaufman before him, executes with rigorous illogic and immaculate formal control. Read full review
80
Screen DailyLee MarshallMay 16, 2015
It may be based on universal human anxieties about love, relationships, compatibility and loneliness, but Filippou’s script takes on a defiant, prickly life of its own, refusing to play as an easy allegory. Read full review
80
The TelegraphRobbie CollinMay 16, 2015
Every frame has been composed with cerebral coolness, and the hotel and its surrounding forests are shot with a dream-like lucidity. I haven’t seen anything quite like it before, and I’m still not sure that I have even now. This is the kind of film you have to go back to and check it really happened. Read full review
80
CineVueJohn BleasdaleMay 16, 2015
Lanthimos has broadened his scope and has created a marvellously bleak, bizarre comedy.
78
Austin ChronicleJosh KupeckiMay 18, 2016
Overall, The Lobster packs a wicked punch, eviscerating modern romance in surprising and evocative ways. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperMay 19, 2016
For about an hour, The Lobster is pure absurdist greatness, brimming with pitch-black shock humor and big, wild ideas. The second half of the film isn’t nearly as imaginative and startling, but I walked out of the screening with the surefire knowledge I wouldn’t soon shake off its most inspired sequences. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleWalter AddiegoMay 19, 2016
If you can live with its blemishes, The Lobster is a bracing experience. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Kate TaylorMar 24, 2016
The Lobster is a brilliant piece of satire, but largely fails in an attempt to build its wicked wit into a more conventional romance. Read full review
70
New York Daily NewsStephen Whitty May 13, 2016
The Lobster is a love story for the unloved. Dark-hearted and brutally sour - and imaginative, and sometimes very funny - it's set in an alternative world where relationships are mandatory. Read full review
70
The New YorkerAnthony LaneMay 9, 2016
The Lobster is more than a satire on the dating game. It digs deeper, needling at the status of our most tender emotions. Read full review
63
Washington PostStephanie MerryMay 19, 2016
Unfortunately, the movie’s second act tends to drag, getting bogged down by uninspired twists, while the first flies by with witty dialogue and a steady stream of novel details. Read full review
63
New York PostKyle SmithMay 12, 2016
Loaded with dazzling ideas that don’t ultimately pull together. Read full review
63
Slant MagazineKenji FujishimaSep 27, 2015
The near-surgical precision with which Yorgos Lanthimos approaches the most surreal of conceits turns out to be a double-edged sword. Read full review
60
Time Out LondonDave CalhounMay 16, 2015
Yes, The Lobster is arch: this is cinema in quotemarks, tongue-in-cheek storytelling that uses absurdity to hold a mirror to how we live and love. At its best, it has incisive things to say about how we shape ourselves and others just to banish the fear of being alone, unloved and friendless. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 16, 2015
It’s an adventure which begins by being bizarre and hilarious but appears to run out of ideas at its mid-way point, and run out of interest in what had at first seemed to be its central comic image: humans turning into animals. Read full review
58
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerMay 13, 2016
Lanthimos doesn’t have the directorial energy to stir this thick allegorical stew. Lacking any of the conventional action-thriller movie skills, his deadpan style may be the only one available to him. Read full review
50
Movie NationRoger MooreMay 24, 2016
More a movie that you appreciate and ponder than one you embrace and enjoy. Whatever its intellectual pretensions, I am looking forward to never seeing it again. Read full review
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