Gentlemen, I suggest you watch two movies, both by the perpetually off-kilter director Yorgos Lanthimos. His earlier film, Dogtooth, is a satire that attacks the family structure and the way we raise and shelter children. It is somewhere between horror and thriller, so if you’re looking for something light, move on to the second recommendation.

His most recent film, The Lobster, is a comedy that deconstructs dating, romance, and the way society tries to coerce people into pairing up. In the film, single adults are corralled into an hotel, where they are informed that they have 45 days to fall in love with another guest or they will be turned into the animal of their choice—a fun little reference to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, perhaps?

Our hero, Colin Farrell, is a meek, quiet, conformist sort who spends a good bit of the movie (badly) lying about his feelings about the women around him so that he can fit in to his present environment; he is the perfect blue-pill man. There are other fun characters, such as a psychopathic female that many of you may recognize, and a desperate post-wall woman who is too explicit in her attempts to charm for anyone to fall for her. The director, Lanthimos, uses awkward characters to guide us through a surreal depiction of the habits, mores, and beliefs commonly held about romance, just as Dogtooth showed a distorted view of typical family relations. I won’t spoil it by going into the specific examples, as they’re revealed with a delicate humor, but I found great depth in these works. The more closely you watch Lanthimos’s work, the more allegory you’ll find. Enjoy, friends!