Poor Things (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) is an extremely rare Everything Movie: It’s comedy, horror, sci-fi, drama, satire and period piece; it’s high-concept and a character study; it’s a directorial, technical and actor’s showcase; with its many sex scenes, but even more ideas, it’s as horny as it is cerebral; it’s a wildly auteurist, challenging film that feels like outsider art, but it nabbed a whopping 11 Oscar nominations. (Maybe the only thing that it isn’t is a box office hit, although it steadily climbed to $105 million worldwide tally, a respectable number for a movie that asks a lot of its audience.) Yorgos Lanthimos – the madman director behind The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Favourite – re-teams with Emma Stone for this jaw-dropping excursion into whimsical grotesquerie, the actress’ unforgettable performance supported by equally unhinged turns from Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo. Is it the absolute best film of 2023? Yeah, it might be.
POOR THINGS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: “It was obvious. Take the infant’s brain out and put it in the full-grown woman. Reanimate her and watch.” Obvious! Bella (Stone) was dead when Godwin Baxter (Dafoe) pulled her from the river, although the child in her womb still lived. And so Godwin – who you may call God for short, if you have it in you, although I don’t blame you if you hesitate – just did what came unnaturally. I mean, he once grafted a bulldog’s head onto a chicken’s body, and now it wanders through his yard, so this is the next logical step. And now Bella has a baby’s mind inside an adult body. Such a miraculous atrocity is possible in this retro-futurist version of Victorian London, shot in sumptuous black-and-white, where Godwin is a prized surgeon whose monstrous physical deformities are a result of his father’s cruel experiments, which he speaks of matter-of-factly, as he is a man of cold science and observation, not fiery emotion. He sees Bella as an opportunity to make detailed observations about human nature. She’s a raw id, walking stiffly and awkwardly, spitting food, speaking in monosyllabic grunts, smashing things, running and screaming and pissing herself.
So of course, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) is utterly in love with her. How could you not be? Max is Godwin’s assistant, tasked with documenting Bella’s development, and as her ability to communicate develops and awareness of herself and the world grows, he recognizes her beauty. Perhaps it helps that Bella has awakened to the pleasures of masturbation, and, unshrouded by the rules of “polite society,” demonstrates with fruit from the dinner table: “Bella discover happy when she want!” she shrieks. Godwin agrees to let them wed, but under the condition that they stay here in his home, so he may continue the experiment, but also protect her from the cruel faces outside that have long looked at his scarred face and grimaced. “So many things outside can kill you, Bella,” Godwin lectures. “Snakes, carriages, shark-faced birds, earthquakes, inhalation of grass seeds.”
Godwin calls in a lawyer to draft the marriage agreement, and as so frequently happens when lawyers enter the plot, shit goes haywire. Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo) takes one look at Bella and is enraptured. He’s a cad. He likes to drink and screw and gamble. He exploits Bella’s desire to see the world by inviting her on an excursion to Lisbon, and off she goes. He beds her, and the world shifts from black-and-white to color as she screams in ecstasy. “Furious jumping,” she calls it. “Why do people not just do this all the time?” she asks, and hey, does anyone have a good answer for that? Didn’t think so. But as Godwin and Max failed to control Bella, so does the loathsome Wedderburn, whose spiels about the joys of freedom and the stifling ways of society become hypocritical screeds when Bella begins exploring Lisbon, and reading books, and talking to other people, and having sex with some of those other people. She is becoming human. She is becoming a woman. Is the world corrupting her, or is she making it a better place?
Photo: Searchlight
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Lanthomos’ array of influence as I see it includes: Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie, any and all iterations of Frankenstein, David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water and if Werner Herzog had directed Poor Things, he might’ve titled it Every Woman for Herself and Godwin Against All.
Performance Worth Watching: Ruffalo has never, ever been funnier; did we know he had it in him? But Stone takes this remarkable opportunity to explore a character from blank slate to mature self-awareness and makes the absolute most of it.
Memorable Dialogue: Bella: “I have adventured it, and found nothing but sugar and violence. It is most charming. I am fine.”
Sex and Skin: Poor Things boasts pretty much all of the sex things while still maintaining a hard-R rating.
Photo: Everett Collection
Our Take: All this lunacy, cruelty and vile portrayals of patriarchal control, and yet Poor Things is ultimately a profoundly hopeful movie. Lanthomos – adapting the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray – has executed a visual and thematic marvel that plays like a parable, like an impressively rich and rude and graphic fairy tale. Are there words more extreme than surreal or bizarre that we can lob at it, and still not quite accurately describe what Lanthomos, Stone, et al., have put on the screen? But where most of the director’s previous films sought to disturb us (I’m looking at you, Sacred Deer), Poor Things avoids the cheapness of shock value, and makes salient observations about femininity and sexuality, and how the world – ruled by men, as ever – seeks to inhibit, contain, squash and even exterminate them.
The Max character functions as our stand-in of sorts, first by wondering what the hell he’s gotten himself into, and then by falling for Bella and contending with the bear trap that is love: He must be selfless and let her go with the slimy Wedderburn, and experience the pain and suffering that reality reaps upon the soul. To do anything else is to stunt her growth, and frankly would torpedo Godwin’s experiment. And so she learns lessons of morality, mortality and money, at first from Wedderburn and then while working in a French whorehouse, which is about as rich an education in the human condition as anything outside of fighting in a war.
Lanthomos uses his signature fish-eye-lens distortions and myopic points-of-view to capture Stone’s amazing psycho-physical performance and some equally amazing set design and visual effects. Tony McNamara’s script is blazingly funny, twisting the formality of turn-of-the-20th-century Britspeak into multiple inventive euphemisms for masturbation and other creative dalliances of vocabulary; sometimes, the dialogue is pointedly literalist, at others, it’s richly metaphorical. It leads to an immensely satisfying conclusion that’s a masterful stroke of a tonal contortionist – it’s as deranged as it is hopeful. “Would you rather the world not have Bella?” Godwin asks at one point, and despite the ethically questionable circumstances of her coming to be, it’s hard to say no. I guess we can say the experiment was a rousing success.
