Institutions of Loneliness
The hotel enforces coupling through deadlines and animal threats. By turning romance into paperwork, the film shows how fear of exclusion—not desire—drives conformity. Bureaucracy becomes a weapon that polices bodies and emotions.
This critique of systemic control parallels the authoritarian scripts in Fight Club, where ideology captures rebellion and rebrands it as obedience to a new rule set.
Symptom Matching and Data Romance
Characters pair by superficial traits (nosebleeds, limp) to satisfy regulation. This satirizes data-driven dating, where compatibility is reduced to sortable quirks. Pattern becomes a proxy for intimacy, flattening desire into a checkbox.
The reduction echoes the way class markers function in Parasite, where scent and space become data points that gate access to comfort.
Violence of Choice
The forest “loners” enforce the opposite dogma—no romance allowed. Lanthimos argues ideology at either extreme polices bodies; freedom requires embracing ambiguity rather than swapping one set of rules for another.
This mirrors the binary-breaking in Dark, where true escape requires rejecting the loop entirely, not winning inside it.
Absurdity as X-ray
The film’s deadpan tone is an X-ray of our own norms: social deadlines, performance of compatibility, and punishment for non-compliance. By exaggerating rules to cruelty, the narrative exposes how real systems already commodify intimacy.
This aligns with the social commentary lens in True Detective, where institutional neglect, not the supernatural, breeds horror.
Key Takeaways
- •Absurd bureaucracy mirrors real pressure to couple on schedule.
- •Superficial matching critiques data-driven romance economies.
- •Freedom is mutual choice, not compliance with opposing dogmas.
- •Deadpan absurdity exposes how systems already commodify intimacy.