The Lobster as a reading object
This edition of The Lobster screenplay, published as part of the A24 Screenplay Collection and distributed through MACK Books, presents the film as a text to be read at the pace of its own logic: dry, formally controlled, and governed by rules that are at once absurd and emotionally exact. A poem by Emma Stone, an essay by Ottessa Moshfegh, and behind-the-scenes set photography by Yorgos Lanthimos extend the edition beyond the screenplay itself.
What registers on screen as atmosphere — deadpan speech, bureaucratic affect, the managed distance between characters — becomes, on the page, a structure of sentences and deliberate repetitions. The screenplay read cold, without image or score, makes visible the mechanisms that the film distributes across performance and sound. Stone's poem and Moshfegh's essay each approach the film's tonal world from a different angle, neither explaining nor summarising it. The set photography grounds the edition in the material conditions of production rather than in the finished work.
The physical object reflects the edition's intentions. The debossed hardcover — 20.3 × 28 cm, 188 pages — gives the book a considered presence. It belongs to a category of Film Books & Film Culture publications that treat cinema as a subject for sustained reading rather than reference. Other Yorgos Lanthimos titles at Lokator100 include Dear God, the Parthenon is still broken and i shall sing these songs beautifully.
About Yorgos Lanthimos
Yorgos Lanthimos is a Greek filmmaker and screenwriter whose work combines absurdist premises with formal visual control and a sustained interest in the systems through which feeling is managed, distorted, or denied. Before his international profile expanded, he worked across theatre, television commercials, and music videos. The Lobster was among his decisive English-language films, establishing the tone most closely associated with his name: formal, unsettling, darkly comic, and built around social structures that expose the mechanisms of intimacy and coercion.
