The Lobster Screenplay Book

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, does more than reproduce a script. It 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. 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 supplementary materials extend that logic outward. A poem by Emma Stone and an essay by Ottessa Moshfegh accompany the screenplay, each approaching the film's tonal world from a different angle. Behind-the-scenes set photography by Yorgos Lanthimos is also included, grounding the edition in the physical conditions of the film's production. Together, these elements make the book something closer to a secondary chamber built around the film than a simple transcript of it.

The physical object reflects the edition's intentions. The embossed hardcover format — 20.3 × 28 cm, 188 pages — gives the book a considered presence on the shelf. It belongs to a category of film publications that treat cinema as a subject for sustained reading rather than reference, and sits within the broader Lokator100 catalogue of Film Books & Film Culture.