Yorgos Lanthimos has come to Cannes with another macabre adventure in black-comic absurdism: his first English-language feature. It’s an adventure which begins by being bizarre and hilarious but appears to run out of ideas at its mid-way point, and run out of interest in what had at first seemed to be its central comic image: humans turning into animals.

The Lobster is a satire on the subject of our universal obsession with relationships, and our conviction that couplehood is the supreme expression of human happiness, a civilised institution which distinguishes us from the beasts.

In a dystopian future, or strange alternative present, adults who are single, either through failure to find a partner or bereavement, must check into a hotel with other singles and find a genuinely compatible partner (the union’s authenticity has to be approved by the management) within 45 days, or they are transformed into an animal of their choice and released into the forest. But they can gain extra time for this “search” period with hunting trips into the forest with rifles and bringing down rebellious “singles” who have escaped into the wild there, living as singleton outlaws.

John C Reilly, Ben Whishaw and Colin Farrell in The Lobster

Colin Farrell plays a sad lonely architect, recently dumped, who arrives at this deeply weird country house hotel - the stern manageress is played by Olivia Colman. He makes uneasy friends with other single guys, played by Ben Whishaw and John C. Reilly, and confesses to his new friends that he wants to turn into a lobster if things turn out badly: because they live for a long time and he has always loved the sea. It is brusquely pointed out to him that he is likely to meet a banal and horrible fate in a restaurant.

They all have to participate in the activities: dancing and social interaction and conform to the strict no-masturbation rule. But Farrell is to glimpse the possibility of escape, and of living among the rebels in the forest in a society whose rules are hardly less dysfunctional and mad than those of the hotel. Here he is to fall in love with a beautiful, lonely woman played by Rachel Weisz and submit to rules imposed by charismatic, ruthless revolutionary played by Lea Seydoux.

The Lobster is elegant and eccentric in Lanthimos’s familiar style: the world of the hotel is brilliantly created, and the film cleverly mocks the unexamined strangeness of hotels with all their corporate furniture of leisure and relaxation. This part of the film looks like the weekend break or team-building exercise from hell. It reminded me a little like Kinji Fukusaku’s survival nightmare Battle Royale or even Michael Anderson’s Logan’s Run, in which people face death by the age of 30.

But once we leave the hotel for the forest, some of the film’s energy, atmosphere and control is dissipated: the superbly clenched, angular weirdness and explosive gags lose their direction and force and Lanthimos’s distinctive weirdness begins to look self-conscious and contrived. The audience is waiting for a climactic transformation scene, or non-transformation scene, or a scene which nails that fascinating and touching idea of a lobster and a lobster’s mysterious destiny. Here, there is disappointment.

But there also dozens of astonishing and strange and funny moments of the sort that only Lanthimos can conjure.