
"Because lobsters live for over one hundred years, are blue-blooded like aristocrats, and stay fertile all their lives. I also like the sea very much."If you're a Hotel resident, you can get additional days added to your alloted 45, and that's primarily based on your rate of success during after-dark field trips hunting Loners. Loners are single people hiding in the woods. Along with an allotment of identical clothing, including the same dress for every woman to wear to eerily joyless weekly dances, all Hotel residents recieve the same black hunting coat to hang on the same peg along with same hunting rifle in their rooms. It shoots tranquilizer darts.
Through David and the other Hotel residents, we come to understand that this system is generally accepted, so we, too, must accept this reality. Accept that being single is against the rules. Accept that the Loners are criminals and you need to hunt them down and bring them to the Hotel. Accept that you are required to match your spouse in ways that you and I consider astonishingly superficial. A limping man who can't find another Hotel resident with a limp does find a woman who gets frequent, sudden nosebleeds, so he slams himself in the nose regularly in order to "match" her, marry her, and escape the trip to animal room. Accept, even, that there's this room where humans are transformed into beasts of the land, sky and sea. As a constant reminder, animals are casually roaming the grounds and the woods. A peacock, a wild boar, lots of dogs. A young blonde woman that David meets by the pool is unapologetically critical of his thinning hair, and she is overly fond of her own long, luxurious locks. Once her 45 days are up, there's a pony with long, luxurious blonde mane and tail.

We are conditioned as audience members to root for a story's protagonist, especially when he or she is an honest, brave rebel, a noble hero whose role is to challenge injustice and lead an alliance that will unseat corrupt and wrongheaded rulers. When the citizenry is oppressed by the power elite that strips free will and stamps out individuality, he's David versus Goliath. But this David is pale, shy and bespectacled. He's not the most sparkling conversationalist. His unremarkable face is fixed in a gloomy, hangdog expression. He's tubby around the middle. He's nobody, he's anybody.
Near the end of his 45 days, desperate to escape becoming a lobster, David feigns being a cold-hearted sociopath in order to match a marginally attractive woman who is a truly cold-hearted sociopath.
What animal does David's wife become? We don't know. That's because the narrator doesn't know. She is one of the Loners, a raven-haired nearsighted woman (Rachel Weisz). Up until David escapes to the woods, this whole story has been told to us by the narrator, based on what David has told her, and he never told her what animal is his former wife.
Though he's escaped The Hotel, we quickly find out it's a frying pan/fire situation. The Loner leader is French, she's beautiful, she's authoritative and she's another sociopath. Under her rule there is mandatory singleness in the woods, and it's just as exacting and ruthless as the marriage law. Even two people dancing together is strictly forbidden. Sexual contact carries consequences worse than being turned into an animal. One of the Loners has a bloodied bandage over his mouth, and the narrator tells of the Red Kiss -- mutilation of the mouths of people caught kissing. She speaks in a shuddering tone of the Red Intercourse. The Loner leader coldly orders every Loner to find a good spot and dig their own grave. If a Loner gets injured, they shouldn't expect to be helped. They should just go straight to their grave, lie in it and cover themselves with dirt. Make it deep enough, and cover yourself with enough dirt so that the dogs don't eat your face.

The secret lovers are found out. The diabolical Loner leader tricks the nearsighted woman into accompanying her into The City for corrective surgery for her nearsightedness. It's a ruse. She's blinded as punishment for breaking the rules. At first she tries to hide her blindness from David, but that lasts about five minutes. When he finds out, he digs deep for courage and heroically bests the cruel Loner leader, immobilizing her and leaving her in his own shallow grave that she'd made him dig. He doesn't cover her face with dirt.

In the final scene, the runaway couple sit across from each other in a restaurant. They are free, they got out, surely they can get far enough away, get new identities, get married. But this is not a "happily ever after" story.
David asks the waiter for a steak knife. "I'll be right back," he tells her. In the men's room, David stands at the mirror, sharp knife point an inch from his eye. She waits for a long time. He doesn't come. Cut to black.
A great deal of the discussion about The Lobster hinges on this ending. If you love the movie, you are okay with this ending. If you hate the movie, cutting to black with no resolve seals its fate for you.
One might think the whole situation makes no sense. If they're both blind, how will they manage? Isn't it better if he can see, so they can both get away? He has already proven, back in the woods, that he's kind and patient and willing to help her and guide her. But that's what makes sense in the world you and I occupy. In this world, you have to match your spouse, so he needs to be blind. In this world, you don't get approval to be together unless you match.
Here is what we know. We know you have to match, not what's in your heart, soul or mind, but match in ways such as limping, lisping, nosebleeds, nearsightedness, even diabolical heartlessness.
We also know the dire importance of sacrificing yourself for the person you claim to love. This is set up earlier, when the Loners carry out a blitz attack on the Hotel. It's a siege they've been planning for months. The Loner leader carries a comically huge handgun. But the attack isn't violent. It's psychological. For his part, David accosts the nosebleed couple, revealing to the woman that her husband is a faker. While he's doing that, the Hotel owners are being forced to prove they love each other. The Loner leader makes the husband choose shooting his wife or saving himself. He saves himself. The gun isn't even loaded, but the silence between the stunned Hotel owners is, and the Loners depart with mission accomplished.
We also know what happens when an adult is found alone. On one of the supply runs to The City, cops stop David and demand to see his papers proving he isn't single. An older woman is also stopped. While David is rescued by his nearsighted secret lover who arrives at his side just in time to convincingly play the role of his wife, the older woman isn't so lucky. She gets forced to her knees, she's about to be hauled off to the Hotel.
So what happens? Based on what we know? David does not come back from the men's room. He does not thrust the steak knife into his eyes. He can't do it. But he also can't go back and face her, having failed as a man. He saves himself, a cowardly and unforgivable act. If he loves her enough, he'll do it. Does he consider why, if she loves him, she'd let him blind himself and in such a painful, bloody way?
Found alone at the restaurant with no papers and unable to make her way back to the woods, our narrator is most certainly arrested. Through her deadened quality of tone and the story's past tense, she's telling this whole tale to the Hotel owners during her admittance interview.
Though there's an outside chance that David made it back to the woods to eke out an existence with the remaining Loners, it is far more likely that he's been arrested and turned into a lobster. The movie isn't called "The Loner Who Got Away."
The brilliance of The Lobster is its understated resoluteness in its portrayal of an uncompromising lifestyle holocaust. It normalizes decent people hunted and punished for the crime of having the wrong marital status, while dangerous criminals are pretty safe as long as they're married.
Being asked to simply accept this strange truth puts The Lobster in league with stories like The Handmaid's Tale, Divergent, Brave New World and The Hunger Games, but it'll also find a fan base among those who appreciate writings of the absurd and satire.
The fact that we're not given any history about how long this strict societal framework has been in place is a sign that it's been a long time, maybe always. We don't know for sure because there's no Morpheus to explain, there's no Kyle Reese, no scrolling screed at the start to tell us who are the oppressors and who are the rebel alliance. That lack of explanation is deliberate. It points up our own mainstream society's absurd norms. In The Lobster, the mainstream legislates against being single. Is it so different from leaders legislating the right and wrong lifestyle for you and me? The "family values" platform pushes the doctrine that same-sex togetherness is an abomination. If they could mandate a hetero lifestyle, don't you think they would? And if they could "cure" homosexuality through some transformative device, wouldn't they put one in every hospital?
For that matter, isn't there a stigma attached to over-40 single men and women? Why the different income tax rules for single versus married? Why do women need to pick from salutations on those online registration forms, but men get to always be Mr.?
Shining a bright, harsh light on man's inhumanity towards fellow man is what absurdist, satire and the dystopia genres seek to do, and this movie nails it. From the moment David shows up at The Hotel calmly leading his brother on a leash, The Lobster wraps the audience in the icy embrace of this uncompromising reality. It's unnerving, twisted and strange, but rife with amplified themes that deal with the rampant absurdity we encounter every day in our comparatively "normal" lives.∎