Timorous, paunchy, and pale, with a sad mustache and a pair of rimless glasses, David (Colin Farrell) checks into a rural hotel. He expects to remain for forty-five days, and, like the other guests—all of whom, male and female, are unattached—he must use the time to procure a suitable mate. Anyone who flunks that task will suffer an unusual penalty. As the hotel manager (Olivia Colman) says to David, “The fact that you’ll turn into an animal if you fail to fall in love with someone during your stay here is not something that should upset you or get you down. Just think, as an animal you’ll have a second chance to find a companion.” She advises him that, if transfigured, he should limit his choice of sweetheart to the same species. “A wolf and a penguin could never live together, nor could a camel and a hippopotamus,” she says. After a moment, she adds, “That would be absurd.” As if everything else she has mentioned is utterly normal.

Only a film with a tenacious grasp of absurdity would allow such talk, and “The Lobster,” the first English-language feature by the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, fits the bill. Tranquil in manner yet brisk in momentum, it lays out the foreground of the story without pausing to fill in the backdrop; clue by clue, we have to work it out for ourselves. The underlying tenet of society, we come to understand, is that people are forbidden to be single. Parts of the film are set in a city, where we see that principle in action. A woman on her own in a mall is stopped by security guards, who demand, politely but firmly, to know the whereabouts of her husband; she explains that he is away on a business trip. Another solo shopper is asked to produce his “certificate,” in order to prove that he has a spouse.

David is a wretched case. (The casting of Farrell, who played Alexander the Great for Oliver Stone, is a subtle joke in itself.) His wife has recently left him, and so he is sent to the hotel; no one must be alone for long. With him he takes a Border collie—a loyal pal, and no wonder, for it is in fact his brother, who presumably tried and failed to find a partner of his own. (Most such failures, according to the manager, elect to become dogs. “That is why the world is full of dogs,” she says.) One pleasure of “The Lobster,” all the more striking for going unremarked, is the array of passing creatures: a flamingo stalks by, providing a splash of pink amid the earth tones of the landscape; and an Irish guest with long blond hair appears outside the hotel, after an unsuccessful stay, as a Shetland pony.

So strong is the conceit behind “The Lobster” that only gradually do you realize how much plot is being packed in. Things begin to stir as David and the other residents, armed with tranquillizer guns, are forced to go hunting. The prey is not beasts but loners: single folk who have gone rogue in the woods and need to be culled. (The chase is shot in slow motion, to extraordinary effect.) Loners willingly follow their own code of conduct, which is every bit as severe as that which prevails at the hotel. They may fraternize, or dance without touching, but that is all: two of them wear surgical dressings on their lips, having been caught in an embrace and punished with something called “the red kiss.” David now absconds to join the loners, and falls in love with one of them (Rachel Weisz). The irony could not be more acrid: our hero, unable to lose his heart at the hotel, then loses it in the one place where the loss is considered a crime. Only in the city, where David and the woman evade suspicion by pretending to be a couple, do we see them share a writhing smooch, and even then they are told not to overdo it. Wherever you go, Lanthimos implies, the laws entrap you.

That is a serious charge, and, for all the pranks that he plays on our assumptions, Lanthimos is full of grave intent. No art, for a filmmaker as for a novelist, is finer or harder than that of keeping a straight face as you hold the world up to scorn. Swift managed it, and so did Buñuel, but few current directors, apart from Lanthimos and Todd Solondz, make the effort. What is more, there’s nothing paltry or cheap about the targets that Lanthimos picks. “Dogtooth” (2009), his breakout movie, sought to dismantle the family unit; “Alps” (2011) took on death, no less, and the culture of grief, with characters being hired to impersonate the deceased for the sake of the mourners; and now we have “The Lobster,” which snaps at love.

You could easily claim that the film confines its ridicule to the Tinderized—to those who are offered such elaborate assistance in the speed and the precision of their wooing that they are left with no excuse for being alone. The script, by Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou, certainly sports with the notion of the perfect match. At the hotel, everyone owns up to a defining flaw. Robert (John C. Reilly) has a lisp, for example, and John (Ben Whishaw) has a limp. So desperate is John to stay human that, having met a woman who gets nosebleeds, he keeps banging his own schnozzle to draw blood, and thus to dupe her into accepting him as her equal. As for David, he is moved to discover that the woman in the woods, like him, is nearsighted. Why should they not peer into the future together?

All this is neatly done, and Whishaw, in particular, is frighteningly dry, yet “The Lobster” is more than a satire on the dating game. It digs deeper, needling at the status of our most tender emotions. Even when David and his fellow-myopic are revealed to be kindred spirits, that kinship affords them little joy. Not once do they seem happy, and I fear that Lanthimos regards romantic bliss, like domestic harmony, as yet another illusion to be pricked. Hence the stern voice-over supplied by Weisz, sounding like a school principal. Hence, too, the soundtrack—mostly jagged snatches of string music by Beethoven, Shostakovich, Schnittke, and others, scraping away any patches of contentment. One image, of four loners walking down a country road, clad in suits, recalls the similar strollers who crop up in Buñuel’s “Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972), yet Lanthimos lacks the master’s blithe awareness that, in the matter of tone, the savage can cohabit with the suave. Although few films this year will make the kind of impression that “The Lobster” does, it remains grim fare, spiky and unconsoling, and, where there are laughs, they die at the back of the throat. To anyone planning to see this movie on a date: good luck.

How do you define the Avengers? Two phrases from “Captain America: Civil War” offer alternative answers. One is “a lot of superpeople.” The other is “a group of U.S.-based enhanced individuals,” which for one heavenly moment suggests that, since we last met Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) and his merry mates, they have put on weight. Imagine a wobbly Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and a lumbering Falcon (Anthony Mackie), with Captain America (Chris Evans), the incredible chunk, bringing up the rear.