The Lobster

Yorgos Lanthimos' The Lobster won the Jury Prize at Cannes 2015 (Lanthimos' first major Cannes recognition) and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the 89th ceremony in 2017, the first writing nomination of Lanthimos' career. The screenplay is co-written by Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou, his regular Greek collaborator across Dogtooth, Alps, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and Kinds of Kindness.

The film is Lanthimos' first English-language feature and the project that established his international directing career, after the breakthrough Greek-language films of the late 2000s and early 2010s. The cast pairs Colin Farrell (in a substantially physical-changed performance, having gained over fifteen kilograms for the role) with Rachel Weisz, Léa Seydoux, Olivia Colman, John C. Reilly, Ben Whishaw, Ariane Labed and Angeliki Papoulia. The film was financed as a five-country European co-production: Ireland, the UK, Greece, France and the Netherlands.

The film was shot largely in Ireland, the central hotel in Parknasilla in County Kerry, the forest sequences in the wider Kerry-Cork region, and the city sequences in Dublin. Cinematography is by Thimios Bakatakis, Lanthimos' longtime Greek-trained collaborator. The film grossed over $15 million worldwide on a modest art-house budget and proved sufficiently commercially successful that A24 and other distributors invested heavily in Lanthimos' subsequent English-language productions including The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Favourite and Poor Things.