If you were to be turned into an animal what animal would you choose? This question remains at the forefront of Yorgos Lanthimos’s first English-language feature The Lobster, where his protagonist David, the bumbling hairy-lipped Colin Farrell, decides he’d like to be turned into just that, a lobster. The premise of Lanthimos’s world is, like his previously acclaimed feature Dogtooth (2009), suitably surreal; singletons have forty-five days in order to find a mate, if they fail they are turned into animals. Co-written with his long-time collaborator Efthymis Filippou the echoes of the past are clear.

This is a world in which we are reminded again and again that there are ‘no half sizes’. A world run by strict regulations, no one measures by halves – there can be no deviations. You are or are not a size, just as you are or are not a human, you are or are not a couple. Identities in The Lobster are defined through the ability to conform and ‘match’ oneself to another, or at least the ability to pretend.

Here a man must fake a lack of heart, a perchance for nose-bleeds, a love of something other than what he is in order to survive. Men must adopt a disguise in order to ‘fit’ with a potential mate. Yet what Lanthimos astutely shows us is that this form of adaptational love rarely leads to happiness, that through compromising our identities, the strange oddities that make us who we are, we risk losing ourselves, a price hardly worth the sanctuary of a human shell. As an animal you will still be able to think, you will still be able to eat, you will still be able to have sex, you won’t – in the words of Olivia Colman’s exquisitely deadpan Hotel Manager – be able to appreciate a good work of literature. It’s an amusing premise, but one that casts a serious shadow. What are the distinctions that separate us from our animal selves? For Lanthimos it appears the differences are few and far between.

In this way The Lobster ultimately brings into question the ludicrous nature of human emotions, our wilful and spontaneous desires, along with the illogical and often bizarre means by which we attempt to connect. How do our lives intertwine with those around us? How do we form relationships? How do we fall in love? The dystopian ‘hotel’, where the majority of the film takes place, is the site that sees singletons through the process of finding a match. If they fail they are taken to the ominous ‘transformation room’ and emerge recast according to their aforementioned bestial preference.

The entire set up feels like some horrific dating night or spa retreat gone wrong (comparisons to Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror often come to mind). When they enter contestants are stripped and made to dress in the same clothes; individuality – the trait you would think would be essential for potential match making – is eradicated. Participants then endure bizarre seminars in which re-enactments of scenes from ‘life’ dictate the importance of the binary pairing of man and woman (interestingly the question of homosexuality barely raises its head in the film). The strange conference setting, complete with a podium and loudspeaker, only adds to the horrific humour of the whole situation. Ballroom dances and breakfast dates are interspersed with the brutality of human ‘hunts’ performed with ritual regularity day in and day out. One of the most enjoyably surreal shots of the film sees the hotel guests leaping through the forest in slow motion to a classical soundtrack, the writhing of their victims and the animal behaviour on both sides magnified to an eerie dance, the madness made almost mundane.

Struggling within the system David breaks away, finding solace in the hunted rather than the hunters. Fleeing to the woods – itself an act of magnificent symbolism – he joins a group of stray loners. Loneliness is marked as something that lasts; unlike the restrictions of singleness in a coupled word, here in the woods ‘there is no time limit’, a stable security in a world ridden with sudden and abrupt alterations. However, led by the wonderfully stony Lea Seydoux, this new environment of supposed ‘freedom’ proves equally austere, with the regimented rules of the hotel staff replicated in the undergrowth of the woodland grounds. Despite its continued comedy the film is grounded in the tragic inability of real relationships to grow either inside or outside the walls of the hotel. Instead we are merely shown new problems, which fester a different kind of social unease. Those who break the rules may not be turned into animals, but they are similarly branded. Betrayers who seek to form deeper more complex relationships with their companions are transformed through grotesque punishments with comparable dehumanising qualities, a sinister ‘red kiss’ (a warped Glasgow smile), ensures no kissing, no connection, perfect silent isolation.

Love inevitably intervenes – Rachel Weisz’s voiceover attesting to this may be the single most annoying fault in the film – but Lanthimos’s deadpan examination of how relationships are built is surprisingly tender. Yet with this tenderness it seems the director sacrifices something. We lose a little of that rare tone of veracity Dogtooth struck: when previously we were made to watch a girl hack at her own body, in The Lobster the eye of the camera is shyer, more elusive, and – in the final moments –potentially more brutal.

By Thea Hawlin