YORGOS LANTHIMOS is not kind of director who typically draws an eager Friday-night crowd. The visionary behind such unabashedly weird films as Dogtooth and Alps, Lanthimos enjoys a certain cachet as a cult director, to be sure: his 2009 film Dogtooth, which depicted an insular household wherein a domineering father figure raised his adult children in isolation and ignorance of the outside world, was a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. His 2011 follow up Alps, which imagined a group of therapists impersonating dead people to bring comfort to the bereaved, was named one of the Best Ten Films of 2012 by The Guardian. But Lanthimos specializes in films that make people uncomfortable, the kind of movies that critics call “challenging” — art-house, conceptual works — and that recommend themselves to instant streaming. Surely even his champions at The Academy and The Guardian would have been shocked to see the line for his latest dystopian farce, The Lobster, last Friday night. It wrapped around the Egyptian Theatre, down North McCadden Place, all the way to Selma Avenue.

Such enthusiastic turnouts for niche films are common, however, at AFI Fest, the Los Angeles film festival that takes place each November in downtown Hollywood. Now in its 44th year, AFI Fest has staked a curious and underestimated position for itself in the film festival world. Arriving late in the year, when most of its films have premiered elsewhere, and set in massive-capacity movie palaces in downtown Hollywood, amid fast-food joints and stores selling fake Oscars and LA-themed shotglasses, the fest doesn’t betray the snobbery of comparable festivals. And yet the films that screen at AFI — primarily the work of young, foreign, and independent directors — are just as cerebral and provocative as those you might see at Sundance. The difference is that at Sundance you shell out at least $450 for a pass and $20 for an individual ticket. At AFI Fest, all the movies are free and open to the public.

It’s a weird and wonderfully idealistic premise. The organizers of AFI Fest seem to believe that if you show the kinds of films that are fêted by the festival people to the moviegoing public, they will come, and even embrace their art-house aesthetics. If Friday night was any indication, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. The Lobster drew a nice crowd of shrewd filmgoers (many were wise enough to queue up an hour early) and young people (perhaps because this was the slower, but free, general-admission line.) Once the film started, however, it was harder to gauge whether they took to it. Even for a crowd this hip, The Lobster was an easy movie to admire and a very difficult one to love.

The movie begins with a random act of violence. When a woman driving through the rain notices a donkey on the side of the road, she disembarks with a rifle and shoots it dead. The scene is entirely unrelated to the ensuing plot — we never see the woman, or the donkey carcass she leaves behind, again. Yet her matter-of-fact manner effectively sets the surreal yet brusque tone of the rest of the film. Post-titles, we pick up with David (a paunchy, bespectacled Colin Farrell), who is checking into a seaside resort for single people. As David goes through an aggressive check-in process, which involves getting one hand locked behind his back in order to understand how much easier everything is “in twos,” we learn that at this hotel, people who have not yet found a “companion” have 45 days to identify a suitable partner. If they fail, they are turned into the animal of their choosing. In animal form, guests are also expected to find a companion. But only a companion who is of the same genus — no cross-breeding, according to the hotel’s manager, played by Olivia Colman. “That would be absurd,” Colman quips, without a trace of a smile.

For all the farcical absence of sentimentality in the hotel’s approach to dating, the film’s imagery is ironically, excessively romantic. Lanthimos arranges his players like lounging aristocrats in a François Boucher painting. He sets their awkward attempts to connect in the lush, organic environs of Ireland’s County Kerry. Were it not for the cutting dialogue and occasional violent outbursts, the setting is the very picture of a bucolic couple’s getaway, and a brilliant send up of the couple-hotel industrial complex.

As a new guest, for instance, David must submit to a cultish reprogramming. He changes into the same fitted blue shirt and slacks that other men at the resort wear, attends fearmongering seminars about the dangers of being single (the hotel staff acts out choking and rape scenarios) in the hotel’s Hilton-esque conference room, and identifies his “defining characteristic” before the other hotel guests — a distinguishing quality that might match him up with a similar person. According to hotel rules, if two hotel guests identify a shared characteristic, they can achieve couple status. Some of the defining characteristics that the guests around David identify will strike anyone familiar with dating-app experience as familiar. One guest identifies her “nice smile.” Others are monstrous perversions. One woman (played by Dogtooth actress Angeliki Papoulia) is known for having “no heart at all.”

At first, David bristles at the ruthless ways his friends Limping Man (Ben Whishaw) and Lisping Man (John C. Reilly) feign defining characteristics to get with eligible girls. Soon enough, though, he’s faking a sadistic streak to cozy up with the Heartless Woman. True to her name, the woman proves to be a nightmare to live with, which provides the cue for the film’s brilliant second act: David leaves his mate and joins up with a fringe group that hides out in the forest, the Loners. Led by a chilly Léa Seydoux, the Loners lead a militaristic lifestyle where the joys of singlehood — Masturbation! Dancing on your own with a CD player! — are tempered by the harsh and bloody punishments inflicted if one gets caught flirting, kissing, or worst of all, having intercourse. After brutally skewering couples culture, The Lobster turns its attentions to another false paradigm of modern romance: “single and loving it.”

Which is the less terrible option for a mateless individual? Lanthimos is careful to point out the horrors on both sides of the equation. At the hotel, David has to put on a front in order to feign coolness to the Heartless Woman. But life isn’t easy for him as a self-determining Loner, either. During his first few days in the woods, David meets a woman who just might be his match — a sweet, similarly short-sighted woman played by Rachel Weisz. The two devise a wordless language of body signals in order to telegraph attraction and the desire within a society that is hostile to any signs of affection. This is one of Lanthimos’s best touches: In a world where you’re either with someone or alone, anything in between is an awkward dance. In this movie, the two-step’s quite literal.

The impediment to their happily ever after in the movie is one that resonates with audiences in our era of digital dating. David and Short Sighted Woman’s world is rocked when they lose the one thing that they have in common. Their plight is an exaggeration of the way that apps like Tinder, Hinge, and Coffee Meets Bagel arrange and deny pairings based on clichéd, self-selected, and potentially false descriptions. In an ideal dating app world, both people in a perfect match will identify as “adrenaline junkies,” “after partiers,” and “bookworms,” to use Hinge parlance as an example — or some combination of these hackneyed characteristics. But when such people are matched based on these platitudes, what does that say about them? That they genuinely embody these clichés? Or just that they are pretending to, in order to be more statistically eligible for matches?

The Lobster points out that the central premise of the whole enterprise is false and misleading, and that to succeed in the system, participants have to be just as fake. The film challenges viewers to question the assumptions made by these technologies, and to direct equal scrutiny at the self-righteousness of defiant singles. It shows the misery and hilarity of buying into one ideal of how to live or another. It seems to be advocating for some kind of middle ground — though, true to form, Lanthimos doesn’t offer us the comfort of depicting what that might look like.

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Katie Kilkenny is a writer based in Santa Barbara, California, where she is an editor at Pacific Standard. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, Indiewire, and Hyperallergic. Follow her on Twitter: @katiekilkenny7.