The Lobster

In a dystopian near future, single people, according to the laws of The City, are taken to The Hotel, where they are obliged to find a romantic partner in forty-five days or are transformed into animals and sent off into The Woods.

Lanthimos's deadpan dystopia about mandatory coupledom earned wide critical enthusiasm for its wit and emotional ambition, but a recurring complaint kept it from being universally embraced: multiple reviewers felt the film loses its grip at roughly the halfway point, when the satirical architecture starts to feel more mechanical than inspired. Those who stayed with it found something rare — a genuinely funny absurdist fable that also manages to be moving.