The ending of the surreal thriller The Lobster raises a number of questions, including whether Colin Farrell’s character David stabbed and intentionally blinded himself or not. After escaping a society where single people are forced to turn into animals, Davis finds himself in a rebel group with precisely the opposite taboo, and ends up falling in love with an unnamed “Shortsighted Woman” played by Rachel Weisz.
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 whether David goes ahead with his gruesome plan.
The World Of The Lobster Explained
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 is sometimes considered one of Colin Farrell’s best movies, and the star 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, and highlights the impossibility of the choice he faces.
Why David Blinds Himself in The Lobster
The hotel in the early part of The Lobster pairs people up based on their superficial characteristics. As David is short-sighted, he is encouraged to pair with short-sighted women, under the theory that they will have something in common. The warped incentives of the system can be seen when John (Ben Whishaw) damages his nose in an attempt to be paired with the simply-named Nosebleed Woman.
While David ends up escaping the hotel, he still ends up following their ideas, whether consciously or not. He ends up seeking a pairing with a short-sighted woman, a trait so important it is used in the script in place of her name. When Lea Seydoux’s Loner leader blinds the woman, David finds that he doesn’t actually have that much in common with her and struggles to make conversation.
David has placed great importance on this relationship, risking his life to escape from the Loners, and now that he has returned to society it seems likely he will just end up back at the hotel if he and the woman go their separate ways. The idea of blinding himself, echoing John’s courtship of the Nosebleed Woman earlier in the film, reflects his desperation to make the relationship work as well as the fatal shallowness of thinking of romance as merely a matching of similarities, whcih helps to explain The Lobster‘s ending.
Why And How Single People Are Made Into Animals In The Lobster
The most sci-fi element of The Lobster is the idea of loveless humans being transformed into animals, a process that nobody seems to question the workings of. Within the magic realism of Lanthimos’ film, this transformation into animals stands in for the importance society places on romantic coupling, or amatonormativity. Long–term single people are perceived as left-over, or in some sense less fully human than those in relationships — hence, in The Lobster they are literally made into subhuman animals.
The exact process of how the transformation works is left somewhat obscure in The Lobster, contributing to the absurdist tone that makes Lanthimos’ film one of the weirdest movies of the 2010s. It is believed to be a somewhat grisly process where humans’ skin is removed and their vital organs transplanted into the relevant animal. However, some viewers have speculated that the transformation into an animal is a guise, and the isolated individuals are simply killed and their organs harvested. The Lobster depicts David forcing Angeliki Papoulia’s Heartless Women into the transformation room, but there’s no depiction of the potentially grisly fate that awaits her.
What Happened To The Heartless Woman In The Lobster
The Heartless Woman, who David attempts to bond with by faking indifference to everything, is one of the most extreme and symbolic characters in The Lobster‘s narrative. David likely chooses to try to adopt her attitude as a way to bury his feelings after being left by his wife, but ultimately isn’t able to embrace her extreme indifference when she starts attacking his brother, who has been transformed into a dog. When she threatens to tell the hotel staff he had been lying, David forces her into the transformation room.
The Lobster doesn’t show exactly what happens to the Heartless Woman, although some viewers believe she is turned into a rabbit who appears later in the film. However, the woman’s ultimate fate reflects that she had already long ago turned into an animal, existing only to coldly hunt other humans. David’s ultimate turn against her foreshadows the choice he will make to defy the Loners and try to pursue a relationship with the Nearsighted Woman later on. While he may not fit into his world’s system of forced coupling, David also doesn’t want to shut out the possibility of love like the Heartless Woman or the Leader. This leads to his difficult choice in The Lobster‘s ending.
