Poor Things (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by John Hall

Produced by Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Emma Stone; directed by Yorgos Lanthimos; screenplay by Tony McNamara; cinematography by Robbie Ryan; edited by Yorgos Mavropsaridis; music by Jerskin Fendrix; production design by James Price and Shona Heath; costume design by Holly Waddington; starring Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbot, Jerrod Carmichael, Suzy Bemba, Kathryn Hunter, Vicki Pepperdine, Margaret Qualley, and Hanna Schygulla. B&W and color, 141 min., 2023. A Searchlight Pictures release.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film, Poor Things, confirms his status as one of the most arresting and unconventional filmmakers of the past decade and a half. He is known for slyly subversive, deadpan satires such as the twisted family drama Dogtooth (2009) and dystopic fable of The Lobster (2015), as well as perhaps his most accessible satire, the comic period drama The Favourite (2018). Many fans of European art cinema have been drawn to his provocative work, though he has his detractors. With a knack for absurdist stories and an equally distinctive visual style (he adores the fisheye lens), Lanthimos remains a thrilling filmmaker—perhaps never more so than in this new film, a re-imagining of the Frankenstein story with a distinctly feminist twist. 

Poor Things is, at its core, about the liberation of its heroine, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), in a Victorian-era world of men who want to possess, shape, and control women. In Poor Things and, to a lesser degree, The Favourite, Lanthimos explores the ways the women use their bodies as means to escape the literal and figurative constraints men have placed on them. The story begins with the creation of Bella in a mad doctor’s lab (in graphic brain surgery), but quickly goes far beyond just observing her as a childlike specimen who needs nurturing and training in walking, talking, and behaving like a proper Victorian woman. Eventually, Bella’s journey becomes a travelogue from London to Lisbon to Egypt to Paris and back to London as it traces Bella’s evolution into a sort of feminist icon, continually shedding the bonds the doctor and just about every other male figure try to use as a straitjacket on her.

In Poor Things, Lanthimos and his team imbue her journey with a sense of magic and wonder, not through the deadpan (un)naturalism of his earlier films, but in a fantastical manner that would please Georges Méliès, Jules Verne, and James Whale. The film even begins in crisp black and white, perhaps an homage to the Universal horror films of the 1930s, like those of Whale, who directed the foundational Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). But the Expressionistic palette later gives way to a bold, surreal color landscape that includes a cartoonish cruise ship and cable cars that look like they have been stolen from a Tintin story. Production designers Shona Heath and James Price devise sets with influences as varied as steampunk and Thomas Eakin’s surgical paintings, as well as Art Deco in the drawing rooms aboard the ocean liner. And there are fantastical images of animals that have crossed species (like the head of a pig married to the body of a chicken, in one of the film’s more inventive uses of CGI). 

These fairy-tale-like animals are among the surgical experiments of the film’s pseudo Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Godwin “God” Baxter (Willem Dafoe, oddly touching under a crazy-quilt facial mask). But his most significant creation and the most imaginative aspect of Poor Things is Bella herself, who has a complicated and disturbing backstory that begins with a suicidal pregnant young woman who is brought back from death through Dr. Baxter’s brain surgery—by implanting the brain of her fetus, no less. While Lanthimos forgoes the iconic harnessing of lightning as a literal source of power in the moment of her creation, he vividly renders Dr. Baxter’s fascination with human rebirth, not in the body of a giant man but of a beautiful woman-child. 

Reborn into her adult body, but with the mind and impulses of an enfant terrible, Bella is initially a kind of a naïve innocent, unaware that she is part of an experiment and trapped in the gothic home of “God,” as she aptly calls him. In the film’s early scenes, Bella can barely walk and smashes glasses and plates in a gleeful fit, like a child throwing a tantrum, seeking to get Dr. Baxter’s attention. Bella is essentially a toddler, initially barely coherent in terms of language, and awkward in her physical movements. Stone, who first worked with Lanthimos as the assertive young heroine in The Favourite, is a marvel when she walks, jutting her hips forward as she staggers around like a stiff drunk. (The dinner-table scenes between Bella and Dr. Baxter are full of whimsical touches, too, as when he pauses after a meal to release an elaborate burp in the form of a giant bubble. The disfigured doctor himself is in fact the victim of his own father’s inhuman experiments that have left him unable to even eat normally.) 

Poor Things is full of “monsters,” for the most part the cruel and amoral men in Bella’s life, rather than Bella herself. Lanthimos and writer Tony McNamara, adapting Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, position Bella as first a fantasy for the many men in her life, but later as a source of torment for some of them, most particularly Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, marvelously oily in a rare comic turn). Duncan enters the story as an unscrupulous lawyer who steals Bella away from Dr. Baxter and his earnest assistant, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef). Duncan aims to take advantage of Bella’s sexual innocence, but she quickly turns the tables on him and wears him out with the joys of “furious jumping,” as Bella labels their vigorous sex. It is not long before Bella also begins to question Duncan’s agenda as he imprisons her aboard the forementioned cruise ship. He becomes an increasingly pathetic figure, desperate to regain control of Bella and to tamp down her growing interest in philosophy, social hierarchies, and her own independence. When an elderly ship passenger (the twinkly Hanna Schygulla) lends her several philosophical tomes to support this independence, Duncan tosses the books overboard (and not much later, attempts to do the same with Schygulla’s character).

The film deepens as Bella matures into a moral, empathic figure who grows angrier and sadder as she learns more about what it is to be human and questions whether it is her fate to be stuck with these controlling men throughout her life. What starts out as a dark comedy gradually turns toward tragedy, but also toward redemption for Bella as she takes control of her life step by step and discovers her origins. She is increasingly curious about these origins—on the verge of finally marrying Max, she avoids matrimony once again, as she had done when running off with Duncan early in the film. Here, she makes a startling but quite rational decision to explore the mystery behind the sudden appearance of her former husband, Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbot). Alfie is the flip side of the overmatched Duncan—he is not just a smooth talker, he is cruel and capable in a way that endangers everyone, Bella included. But Bella literally gets the last laugh in the film’s punchline-like final garden scene. [Spoiler Alert] In her crafty response to Alfie’s threats, it is apparent that she has learned a good deal from Dr. Baxter’s surgical endeavors. She has taken his experiments one step further: the joining of man and beast, a fitting conclusion to the Frankensteinian nature of her tale.

Part of the film’s complexity arises from how it uses sex as a means for Bella’s physical and moral development. Some viewers may wish Lanthimos had made Stone’s nudity less flagrant at times; the problematic male gaze is ever-present, both in the film’s male characters and from the eye of the lens. (Though, to be fair, Lanthimos also presents male nudity just as directly and honestly.) We see Bella discover self-pleasure and the joys of sex. Later, Bella turns toward prostitution as a means to support herself, and the Paris brothel scenes are some of the most distinctive Lanthimos-esque moments—he’s drawn to the awkwardness and matter-of-fact nature of business in the brothel, with her clients often shown as grunting, crude beasts. Yet there is a touching exchange with one French client, where as a form of foreplay she trades a dirty joke for one of his earliest childhood memories—Bella is determined to make her job something more than just bad sex, to find meaning in everyone’s life. She is also not just getting an education in sexual power; she bonds with a black prostitute who introduces her to lesbian desire and radical politics, and she begins to challenge the notion that the male customers are given the right to choose their partner. Why shouldn’t it be the other way around? she asks the madam, only to be shut down with a lesson in brothel-based capitalism.

The film’s originality informs every aspect of its production. Stone gives a witty and nuanced performance that has unexpected depth. She is a natural comedienne, dancer, and performer—her dance scene with Ruffalo is one of the film’s standout scenes. Stone initially clumps around until Bella begins to really feel the music and imitates the waltzing of the other dancers; suddenly, Stone thrusts her hips in a manner that wouldn’t be out of place in a recent hip-hop video. With Bella’s ever-growing mane of black hair and her saucer-like eyes, Stone cuts a striking figure throughout, especially in Holly Waddington’s imaginative twists on Victorian dresses and swinging Sixties shorts. Bella’s grasp of language continues to develop as well. Stone has worked with screenwriter Tony McNamara before on films such as Cruella and The Favourite, but their shared appreciation of language is especially apparent here. Poor Things has some of the most creative dialogue of any recent film, with an ear for Bella’s contorted and frequently subversive use of English that lands just right. Bella’s use of “softitude” to describe the quality of her porcelain skin is one lovely example. 

The film is just as striking aurally. Composer Jerskin Fendrix’s work may be unsubtle, but it is continually imaginative. Fendrix (a stage name for Joscelin Dent-Pooley) uses sound that is akin to some of Radiohead’s most avant-garde tracks—there is a sense of otherworldliness (some passages also eerily resemble Mica Levi’s unsettling work in Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 film Under the Skin), but there are other moments where the score becomes jarring and comically loud, italicizing the film’s tragicomic nature.

That tragicomic and exaggerated quality extends to the visual inventiveness of Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan (C’mon C’mon). Yes, as in their previous work, The Favourite, they often rely on Lanthimos’s signature fisheye shots to add an even greater sense of distortion to the film. But Lanthimos also incorporates striking visual effects to create a sense of child-like wonder and despair, especially in the scenes in Alexandria where Bella confronts the degradation and suffering of the poor for the first time. This moment recalls Bella’s earlier introduction, aboard the ship, to philosophical debates over humans’ moral imperatives to better the world. Soon she takes up her own cause, liberating herself from Duncan and any other man who tries to make her conform to the stifling patriarchal strictures of women’s lives in Victorian England and beyond. 

With its mainstream success, Poor Things may mark a turning point in Yorgos Lanthimos’s career—and Emma Stone’s as well. He has carved out a path of great freedom and originality in his earlier films, which were sometimes divisive in their deadpan, dark visions of human nature. But his more accessible and assured work with Stone in The Favourite and now Poor Things has put him in the top rank of contemporary directors. Meanwhile, Emma Stone stands out as one of the most talented actors we have right now. She is rightfully celebrated for her repeated gigs as a Saturday Night Live host and her comic turns in Hollywood hits, but she is showing potential for far darker work. Poor Things may be Emma Stone’s liberation as much as Bella Baxter’s.

John Hall, a Master Lecturer in Film and TV Studies at Boston University’s College of Communication, teaches classes on genre, aesthetics, contemporary East Asian cinema, and film and TV criticism.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 2