Part Frankenstein, part Belle de Jour, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things is the latest career summit for the Greek auteur known for telling stories about relationships, families, and sexuality while tossing many of the rules of filmmaking out of a high window. His first feature since 2018’s The Favourite — reteaming him with Emma Stone — follows an unusual heroine on a grotesque picaresque journey, as she defies the gender roles of the Victorian era and instead discovers her own agency.
Of course, in a Yorgos Lanthimos film, this journey never travels a predictable route. Bella (Stone) at first appears to be a feral creature, dropping plates, spitting out food, and gleefully stabbing the eyeballs of cadavers being stored by her caretaker, physician and professor Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), whom she calls “God.” Baxter — his face a mass of scars and his body in constant need of hook-ups to external machines because of his surgeon-father’s experiments upon him — brings medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) home to observe Bella’s progress.
Max becomes smitten with Bella, and Baxter confesses how she came to enter his household: Baxter found the body of a pregnant woman who had just jumped off a bridge to her death, and rather than revive her (and have her subjected to life in an asylum for having attempted suicide), the doctor transplanted the fetus’ brain into the mother’s body, creating an adult discovering the world again as a child. Baxter keeps Bella hidden away from the world, but his smarmy lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) falls for her and seduces her into running off to Lisbon with him.
“Don’t make the mistake of falling in love with me,” he tells her in one of many post-coital moments, but as Bella begins to better understand herself and the world around her, it is Duncan who becomes hopelessly besotted, driven further and further to madness as she takes on increasing levels of independence as a thinker and as a sexual being.
Screenwriter Tony McNamara, another alum of The Favourite, adapting the novel by Alasdair Gray, meticulously crafts a full-fledged verbal evolution for Bella, from random blurts (she yells, “Squish! Squish!” when stabbing those eyeballs) to blunt expressions of her feelings (regarding an infant in a restaurant, she observes, “I must go and punch that baby”) to an eloquence in defending herself and her choices. Regarding sex work — which she eventually chooses willingly, both for the life experience and for the money — and socialism, Bella notes, “We are our own means of production.”
As with Lanthimos’ previous films, Poor Things never allows viewers to get too comfortable or too acclimated to their surroundings; it’s a film that’s constantly throwing set pieces and absurdist humor and over-the-top outfits at the audience, but the effect is exhilarating rather than enervating. Director of photography Robbie Ryan works overtime, switching from black and white (Bella’s pre-orgasmic life ensconced in Baxter’s house) to rich color, frequently (but never excessively) employing a fish-eye lens throughout, and production designers James Price and Shona Heath create a fascinating vision of 19th-century Europe, from elevated rail cars in Portugal to a phallus-themed entryway to a Paris bordello to a steamship that resembles a collaboration between Jules Verne and Terry Gilliam.
Costume designer Holly Waddington throws one surprise after another into the costuming of Bella; her tops always seems to have a few too many ruffles, or sleeves just a little over-puffed, or a neckline that’s just a little too high, often paired with anachronistically short skirts and white shoes. Between her outfits (which call to mind the extreme creations of Rei Kawakubo) to flat-on-top, long-in-back hair and severe eyebrows, Bella never exists in a visual state of calm or complacency.
Neither does Emma Stone: In a role that calls upon her both to come of age (starting at infancy) and to act as the architect of her own soul, she plunges in ferociously, tackling the physical and emotional demands of Bella with utter commitment. Ruffalo has never been funnier as a rake who finds himself on the other side of the seduction game, and Dafoe finds notes of grace and compassion in a (mad)man of science heretofore divorced from humanity, his own or anyone else’s. (He made a great Nosferatu in 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire; here, in a sense, he’s playing both Frankenstein and his monster.)
Lanthimos peppers the film with delicious supporting appearances from Youssef, Christopher Abbott, and Kathryn Hunter (most known for her mesmerizing turn as the three witches in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth). Few directors would pair Jerrod Carmichael and Hanna Schygulla as traveling companions, but now that Lanthimos has, one can only hope he’ll reunite them for a spin-off story of their own.
In The Favourite and the Hulu series The Great, McNamara has brilliantly captured powerful women taking control of their sexuality — and sexual women taking control of their power — and with Poor Things, he creates another hero who spurns societal expectations and the desires of men who want to control her. Paired with Lanthimos’ audacious vision and Stone’s fearless performance, the results are electrifying.
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Screenwriters: Tony McNamara, based on the novel by Alasdair Gray
Cast: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, Suzy Bemba, Jerrod Carmichael, Kathryn Hunter, Vicki Pepperdine, Margaret Qualley, Hanna Schygulla
Producers: Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone
Executive producers: Daniel Battsek, Ollie Madden
Director of photography: Robbie Ryan
Production design: James Price, Shona Heath
Costume design: Holly Waddington
Editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis
Music: Jerskin Fendrix
Sound: Johnnie Burn, sound designer
Production companies: Searchlight Pictures, Film 4, TSG Entertainment, Element Pictures
In English
141 minutes
