Caterwaul

The scouts

Everyone expects the lobster to be a metaphor—isolation, mortality, whatever—but Samuels refuses to wink at you; he just lets the tenderness sit there, unsettling and genuine, which is somehow more subversive than any ironic twist could be.

The film's restraint places it squarely in a lineage of contemplative portraiture—closer to Bresson than to whimsy—where the formal decision to treat the relationship with absolute seriousness becomes the whole argument.

The crucial move is the sound design: the lobster's clicks and the fisherman's breathing aren't distinguished as 'human' vs. 'animal'—they're given equal sonic weight—and that single choice transforms what could've been maudlin into something genuinely intimate and strange.