This Colin Farrell Sci-fi HBO Max Hit Deserves a Second Chance

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Colin Farrell looking at John C. Reilly in The Lobster

Published Jun 30, 2026, 5:23 PM EDT

Luca Mehta is a Chicago-born critic, interviewer, and podcaster based in Toronto. He specializes in retrospectives, new releases, genre films, and red carpet interviews.

Before Celine Song made her dating-app diatribe with last year’s Materialists, there was Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster. Released in 2015 and serving as Lanthimos’s first English-language film, fifth feature film, and third with co-writer Efthimis Filippou, respectively, The Lobster announced a new voice in the space between independent and mainstream cinema, carving out an idiosyncratically Kubrickian niche within the contemporary cinematic landscape. Leapfrogging from an A24 darling to a three-peat Oscar contender with juggernauts such as Bugonia, The Favourite, and Poor Things, The Lobster (which earned Lanthimos and Filippou their first Oscar nominations) marked a transition point for the Greek auteur, catapulting him into the conversation of the great 21st-century filmmakers.

Set in a near-future quasi-dystopia in which the world’s loners are arrested and kept in a matchmaking hotel lest they turn into animals of their choosing, The Lobster follows David (Colin Farrell), a newly-eligible bachelor whose punishment animal is a lobster. The first of two collaborations with the Irish superstar (the latter, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, is a personal favorite), The Lobster also marked a transition point for Farrell, suggesting that his rugged good looks and 2000s star persona concealed an interior sensitivity. Divisive as we would later learn all Lanthimos films to be, the past eleven years have proven The Lobster as one of both Lanthimos’ and Farrell’s most sentimental works to date.

'The Lobster's Premise is Wholly Original

Trite as it may sound, it’s hard to describe The Lobster (or any Lanthimos film, honestly) without saying the word “strange.” Mastered in his 2009 feature Dogtooth, Yorgos Lanthimos’ stilted dollhouse style often reads like Greek tragedy (The Killing of a Sacred Deer adapts and directly references Iphigenia at Aulis), reveling in a mean-spirited, detached approach. Every character speaks as if it’s their first social interaction, cultivating the hilariously infamous bone-dry tone that Lanthimos calls home. A pitch-black satire of the pressures of romantic companionship in the nuclear age, Lanthimos’ austerity embodies the loneliness of the contemporary single life. Acting as an allegory for dating app culture, the hotel exists as an algorithmic, norm-enforcing, and unfeeling institution of manufactured cupid-playing.

Choosing a lobster for its mortal and sexual longevity (and regal-blue blood), David’s true crustacean-ness comes from a lack of backbone and a desperate need to come out of his shell. The looming threat of therianthropy weighs heavily on David in the form of his brother, Bob, who is now a border collie, further driving a societal and self-imposed need to find a mate. On top of that and the 45-day window, the guests are led on hunts to find escaped singles in the forest. At every turn, the hotel’s program and staff (led by a deadpan Olivia Colman, who would later win an Oscar for The Favourite) inundate their residents with They Live-style propaganda, promoting amanonormativity between the loners.

'The Lobster' Review: Cringe-Worthy Absurdism (in a Good Way)

Yorgos Lanthimos latest film is pitched somewhere between Luis Bunuel and Larry David.

Yorgos Lanthimos as a Burgeoning Auteur

Practically every film in Yorgos Lanthimos’ filmography is punctuated by bizarre sexual encounters and chilling acts of violence, with The Lobster teetering more towards the former than the latter. Scenes of maids dispassionately grinding on and subsequently blueballing David are intercut with a lisped man (John C. Reilly) having his hand forcibly placed into a toaster; Monologues of sexual capability are followed up with genuine threats of suicide; Self-harm and rabbit-killing are used as modes of courtship. Gratuitous as the subjects may seem, Lanthimos's use of neither sexuality nor violence is without undertone, as The Lobster uses said themes and imagery to emphasize the filtered primality of human connection and artificial matchmaking's bastardization of traditional courtship.

Paired with a general antipathy for any living organism on God’s green earth, The Lobster, above all else, further establishes Yorgos Lanthimos as a formalist. Many of Lanthimos’ trademarks are scattered throughout The Lobster, particularly in its wide-angle photography (this was before he discovered the power of the fisheye lens), use of grandiose orchestral music, and slow-motion photography. Lanthimos' use of licensed orchestral music was an early quirk of his, and wouldn’t hire a composer until his post-Poor Things collaborations with Jerskin Fendrix, situating The Lobster within an early-to-mid period of Lanthimos’ oeuvre. Still in the genesis of Lanthimos as a visual experimentalist, The Lobster establishes Yorgos as a minimalist before his later ventures into maximalism.

Colin Farrell Turns Over a New Leaf

Colin Farrell, John C. Reilly, and Ben Whishaw as David, Robert, and John, wearing suits and looking unimpressed in The Lobster

Before working with Lanthimos, Colin Farrell’s early filmography can only be deemed as “rocky.” Barring gems like Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, and Terrence Malick’s The New World, Farrell struggled to find himself a niche as a movie star, coasting from one mid-tier blockbuster to another with no sense of vocational direction. Farrell wouldn’t truly find his footing as a leading man until Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges, which not only encapsulated the quiet sadness behind Farrell’s eyes but also his natural charm and sense of humor. Things didn’t change overnight for Farrell, though The Lobster finally steered his career in the right direction. Some actors opt for a change of pace; Farrell opted for a complete reinvention.

Playing against type, Farrell’s performance as David is anything but flattering. Having gained about 40 pounds in under eight weeks, Farrell’s thin-rimmed glasses and thick mustache present an antithesis to the heartthrob from Miami Vice. There’s a closed-off frumpiness to David (and even an underlying darkness) that’s almost Tim Robinson-esque, with the monotone of a grade-school presentation. With Lanthimos as his puppetmaster, Farrell established a new dimension to his persona, earning his second Golden Globe nomination alongside widespread praise from critics’ circles. Succeeded by auteur-driven projects like Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, Kogonada’s After Yang, Martin McDonagh’s Oscar-nominated The Banshees of Inisherin, and blockbusters like Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen or Matt Reeves' The Batman, Farrell finally has the status he deserves.

'The Lobster' and Postmodernist Romance

Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz hugging in 'The Lobster'

Out of The Lobster’s many unconventionalities, its most fascinating aspect might be how it doesn’t introduce the love interest, a short-sighted woman (the always-superb Rachel Weisz, who also narrates the film), until exactly an hour in. When a right-swipe goes horribly wrong, Farrell joins an anarchic group of “loners” led by a steely Léa Seydoux, though it has its own set of rules for dystopian companionship. The hotel, like a dating app, emphasizes the superficial versus the meaningful, whereas the loner group has a strict no-romance policy, thus setting a binary between the two systems. The Lobster asks us to love outside such binaries, posing a return to the natural order of romantic companionship.

Despite the veneer of Lanthimos’ stilted direction, many of The Lobster’s best moments are when Farrell and Weisz share the screen. Highlights include a scene in which they fool a togetherness-enforcement agent at a mall, their first genuine kiss while listening to music on their headphones, and a finale that’s both macabre and deeply moving. These moments of genuine beauty and compassion between characters are few and far between in Lanthimos’ otherwise misanthropic filmography, making The Lobster all the more special in hindsight. It’s a rejection of contemporary romantic subjugation, asserting that love is, in fact, blind. Love in the wild isn’t based on the material (seahorses mate for life, after all), so why should it be different for us?

'The Lobster' Still Holds Up

Colin Farrell as David and Rachel Weisz as Short-Sighted Woman in The Lobster

Launching both the director and star into a new register of cinematic spotlighting, The Lobster holds up as not only a piece of contemporary romantic satire but a turning point previously unseen for either party. It’s a bummer that Yorgos Lanthimos and Colin Farrell haven’t collaborated since their best work, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, though there’s still ample time for further ventures. Over eleven years later, The Lobster not only functions as a denunciation of the now-dominant form of dating culture’s fragile structure but also as a new chapter for Lanthimos and Farrell.