If Charlie Kaufman, Miranda July, and Wes Anderson went into the woods together and all had the same vision quest hallucination, it might look something like The Lobster, the new film from Greek art house sensation Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth), which premieres at the Cannes Film Festival today. It’s got Kaufman’s brainy, inventive, slightly dyspeptic sense of world-building, mixed with July’s dark, offbeat whimsy, and Anderson’s presentational style. Though, to reduce The Lobster to a series of comparisons is probably unfair; it’s very much its own unique animal, a strange swirl of satire, allegory, and metaphor that makes a rueful tragic comedy of modern romance.

The film rotates on an old, well-worn axis: the question of living single versus being coupled off. Is singledom some lonely march toward oblivion, or is it somehow wild, transgressive, liberating? Are romantic relationships the safe harbors and social affirmations they’re often sold as? Or are they inevitably suffocating, built on ultimately shallow or meaningless points of connection, rife with lies and sublimated truths? Put in simpler terms, these are the questions of myriad romantic comedies and sitcoms; the great divide between the have-loves and the have-nots explored over and over again. But Lanthimos, and his co-writer Efthymis Filippou, find a new way to mull over these broad themes—in creating an elaborate alternate reality, they distill the social pressures of love and courtship to their scary, sublime essence.

In near-future (or something) Ireland (or somewhere), single people are taken from The City and moved into a nursing home-like hotel, where they’re given 45 days to find a mate. If they don’t succeed, they will be turned into animals and released into the wild. There’s a grim way to get extra time at the hotel, though: the guests (prisoners, really) are frequently taken out to the woods to hunt, with tranquilizer guns, roving bands of “Loners,” forest-dwelling renegade singletons who refuse to play by this stark society’s rules. This nutty premise is played pretty deadpan, though the film allows itself to wink on more than a few occasions, sometimes seeming perhaps a bit too pleased with its own quirky cleverness.

Colin Farrell plays an unnamed man, pudgy and defeated, who is moved to the hotel after his wife leaves him for another man, forced to restart his romantic life or be turned into a lobster. (That was his choice, because lobsters live a long time and he likes the sea.) The man doesn’t seem terribly interested in finding a partner, though. He mostly sits in his room with his brother, who is now a dog, or half-heartedly participates in the hotel’s forced activities and the unnerving hunts for Loners. He makes a few sad stabs at connecting, through both openness and deception, but mostly seems resigned to his fate. Has he given up? Not quite, we learn, as the film ventures into those woods and we encounter some Loners, particularly two women played by Léa Seydoux and Rachel Weisz. (Ben Whishaw, John C. Reilly, and Ashley Jensen play some of his fellow guests.)

Lanthimos seems particularly interested in what online dating has done to human interaction. The guests are told to assign themselves a defining characteristic—Whishaw has a limp, Reilly has a lisp, an unfortunate young woman has frequent nosebleeds—the hope being, and in some ways the requirement being, that they find someone with that same trait. I took this to be a joke about how dating profiles, on Tinder and the like, reduce the complexity of a person, all the weird and wonderful shading and contradiction of humanity, to quick bullet points. “I like this. Do you like this too? Then we’re a match.” With this the film could be arguing that we’re on the way to losing our ability to make real, meaningful connections. But I don’t think The Lobster is actually that pointed a film—it’s more a series of melancholy observations than it is a dark prophecy. There’s a fog of weariness and shaggy despair hanging over the whole film, the palette all wet gray and deep green. Lanthimos is wallowing, but there’s still something transcendent about his earnest pondering of these big, basic topics. “I’m right there with you,” he seems to be saying to the audience, whether they’re mired in the tundra of singledom or feeling cramped or unsure in a relationship.