This movie opens up with a woman in her car looking at 3 Donkeys grazing. She gets out of her car and shoots one of the Donkeys and then gets back into her car and watches as one of the Donkeys goes over to look at the dead Donkey that the woman just shot. As you get into the rest of this horrible movie you realize that the Donkey assassination at the start of this film was the screenwriters attempt at summarizing the point of this mess of a story. Namely, that the message is that if you are not paired up with someone then you should be dead and society should have you killed. More amazingly this movie suggests that you should be killed and then come back as another animal of your choosing where perhaps you can pair up with another animal of your chosen new species. This society of some alternate universe or future at least has the decency to give you 45 days to live in a dating camp where you have your last shot at finding someone to love and if you don’t, then you will be killed and turned into the animal of your choosing. It doesn’t seem to matter that medically this is not possible or that this is barbaric, what matters here is the message above all else.
This middle of this movie establishes the law that this strange society has mandatory mating because the main character played by Colin Farrel is approached by a law enforcement officer who demands to see his spouse who he says is in a store with their appropriate marriage forms. Rachel Weisz plays Farrel’s girlfriend in this movie and its hard to fathom why either one of these respected actors would ever agree to be in this disaster of a production.
Given the difficulty of coming up with new movie ideas, it’s understandable that a screenwriter and director would want to do something never been done before with a big message that is an “art house” type of movie, but this film is so disgusting, horrible, weird and bad that any message that is trying to be conveyed would be lost in nausea that makes up the majority of this messed up 2 hours.
Other insane scenes include Farrel’s girlfriend killing his dog off camera to prove that Colin Farrel is a sensitive and caring person so they are not really compatible. Another man slamming his head against a table so he has a bloody nose like a woman he wants to be with. The message here is I guess that people at times would do anything to not be alone, including lying to themselves and other people to be something or someone that they are not. If this is in fact, the message then why did the writer and director think that it was necessary to convey that message with death and violence at this level? Other scenes include some of the members of this dating camp going out and hunting the other single people who “did not make it”, or did not find a suitable love mate in the 45-day time limit. These people are hunted humanely with tranquilizer darts, only to later be dismembered, their organs and blood sent to hospitals and then converted into animals of their choosing, and in Farrel’s case a Lobster – supposedly because Farrel’s character believes that they live as much as 100 years.
I went to see this movie only because some of the reviews I saw on the internet were very positive. My guess is that whoever reviewed a movie this weird, disgusting and bad movie positively must be on Heroin because sitting through 2 hours of this horror seemed like what a drug overdose should feel like. It’s insane that a movie like this was even made and even more insane that 2 quality and famous actors agreed to make it. Colin Farrel even gained about 40 pounds to make this disaster and you just have to wonder what he was thinking. The last time I saw a movie that had this level of weird behind it was The Beaver which was directed by Jodie Foster and a disgraced Mel Gibson and came out in 2011. Another movie to never see.
My recommendation is to run from this disaster.
