Good luck if you can make sense of The Lobster

The Lobster is an entirely peculiar movie from start to finish that will no doubt hold your interest but as it held ours but in the end I just shrugged my shoulders and thought why did I waste 2 hours on that? The premise, such as it is: we are in some kind of alternate world (maybe in the future, maybe in another state of being) in which there seems to be some kind of great societal battle between people in couples and "loners." The film opens as a middle-aged man recently widowed or in some way separated from his wife is taken away by some unexplained posse for a stay in a resort-type hotel where he has a set amount of time - 45 days I think - to become a couple with one of the women at the hotel. The trick is that two can form a couple only if there share some kind of malady or shortcoming, ranging from the trivial - near-sightedness, for example - to the more profound: complete lack of empathy. If he fails to couple, he will be transformed into an animal of his choice (his choice is a lobster because he loves the sea). Eventually he escapes the premises and allies himself with a cadre of loners, who have equally strict prohibition against building any sort of relationship with anyone else in the group - a taboo he breaks by falling in love (w/ loner Rachel Weisz). Ok so this movie is not meant to be realistic on any level - so I guess it's allegorical or symbolic somehow? But symbolizing what? The triviality of many supposedly happy relationships? Our societal obsession with family values (or with individual expression)? Maybe, but none of this felt in the least enlightening to me. There are some tense moments and some funny ones - the dialogue among the hotel guests and between the loners can be weirdly ludicrous at times - but the movie is also stunningly cruel, even sadistic at many points, and the score is infuriating - using a beautiful passage from a Beethoven quartet repeatedly to the point where I'm afraid I'll never hear that passage without thinking of this stupid movie.