The big question everybody has at the end of The Lobster is whether Colin Farrell’s character David stabbed himself or not – let’s breakdown the ending. Any film fan with a couple of Yorgos Lanthimos movies under their belt can confirm they’re often a little out of the ordinary. The Greek filmmaker’s breakout Dogtooth was a surreal and grimly funny film about authoritarian parents who keep their three adult children isolated from the outside world and bizarrely misinformed about it.
Lanthimos’ 2011 follow-up Alps had a similarly offbeat premise, focusing on a group of people who offer a service to the recently bereaved that involves impersonating their dead loved ones while his 2017 film The Killing Of A Sacred Deer was an unsettling update of a Greek tragedy. His absurdist black comedy The Lobster – which Lanthimos sandwiched between Alps and The Killing Of A Sacred Deer – is no different.
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Released in 2015, The Lobster was Lanthimos’ first English-language feature and received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Original is a perfect word to describe The Lobster: it’s set in a dystopian society in which being single is against the law. People who become single are sent to a hotel populated by fellow singletons where they have 45 days to find a partner based on shared characteristics or else they are turned into an animal of their choosing. That’s the predicament newly divorced, short-sighted David (Colin Farrell) finds himself in as he rocks up to the hotel with his dog Bob in tow (who used be his human brother) and opts to be turned into a lobster if he doesn’t find ‘love’ in the allocated time.
This strange, relationship-obsessed dystopia does have a rebel movement, however. Calling themselves the Loners, the group lives in the woods and strictly forbids any type of romantic relationship. David eventually joins the rebel faction where he meets another loner (Rachel Weisz) who is short-sighted like him. They begin a secret relationship and plan on running away together until the leader of the Loners (Léa Seydoux) blinds the Short-Sighted Woman as punishment for their betrayal.
The Lobster’s ending finds David and the Short-Sighted Woman sitting in a diner and desperately trying to find something else they have in common. David decides the best course of action is to blind himself with a steak knife so he and the Short-Sighted Woman are back on the same level. The Lobster ending shows David attempting to stab himself in the eyes but hesitating a few times before the screen goes black. It’s an ambiguous ending that never answers the question of whether David goes ahead with his gruesome plan.
Colin Farrell offered his own take on the ending of The Lobster in an interview with EW. He thinks there are three options; David blinds himself, gets the hell out of there and leaves the Short-Sighted Woman hanging or chickens out of stabbing himself but tells the woman he went through with it. The Lobster’s ending leaves it up to viewers to decide what course David takes.
