Poor Things (IRELAND/UK/US: Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023) 

Emma Stone excels as she re-unites with Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos in Poor Things.

***** 

In previous films such as Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), Yorgos Lanthimos has carved a reputation as a chronicler of the bizarre, idiosyncratic vagaries of human existence. The director’s latest feature, Poor Things, is probably his most wonderfully perverse yet. A weird and surreal gothic fairy tale, wickedly adapted by Tony McNamara from the Alasdair Gray novel, it is questionable whether there will be a more joyously bawdy, audacious slice of the carnivalesque released at the cinema this year. 

In Victorian London, we see a young woman jumping from a bridge on the Thames. The woman is Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone, who is surely one of the most reliably watchable stars currently working in Hollywood. Stone is a formidable presence in the film, coming across like a force of nature and her performance constitutes a career-defining high. At the outset, Bella is an emotionally and intellectually challenged young woman who displays the intelligence and behaviour of a small child, her bodily movements out of synch with her brain owing to an experiment by her guardian, the surgeon and scientist, Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Godwin is addressed as “God” by Bella and his name is one of many references to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the film. Like Doctor Frankenstein, the hideously scarred Godwin is a modern Prometheus, capable of cheating death and creating life through the process of galvanisation. At the beginning of the film, we see the results of Godwin’s experiments: a strange half-dog, half-chicken hybrid and other weird creatures, wandering around Baxter’s home. This is just one of countless oddities conveyed in this freakish and compelling film.

 Bella’s development is initially observed and recorded by Godwin’s assistant, the medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef). But, as she starts to mature, Bella soon becomes restless, expressing a desire to venture outside the Baxter household and to explore the world for herself, explaining that: “There is a world to enjoy- circumnavigate. It is the goal of all to progress- grow.” Her opportunity comes with the arrival of Duncan Wedderburn, a deliciously sleazy Mark Ruffalo in fine comic form. Wedderburn introduces himself to Bella by immediately grasping her crotch and he takes an immediate sexual interest in her. Soon, Bella has been whisked away by the vain and pompous Wedderburn, setting out on a grand tour and embarking upon an odyssey of self-discovery in the process. 

 Owing to her possessing a baby’s mind in a grown woman’s body, Bella is a natural free spirit, liberated from the demands of polite society, and Stone captures both the vulnerability and wilfulness of the woman-child in her expressions and mannerisms perfectly. Then Bella discovers the pleasures of the flesh: firstly masturbation (“Bella discover happy when she want”); and then intercourse, which she describes as “furious jumping” in the film. And there is a copious amount of “furious jumping” on display here, with Bella romping her way across Europe and North Africa, eventually coming to work at a brothel in Paris. In addition to all the bonking and decadence, Bella also engages in a process of self-education, discovering philosophy and politics to become an auto-didactic woman of the Enlightenment. In Alexandria, she sees poverty for the first time, discovering human cruelty and injustice which she had previously been shielded from in her cosseted environment back home. Similarly, as her mind matures, Bella also comes to reject the notion of male ownership of the female body and, as it touches upon issues of female agency, liberation and empowerment, Poor Things reveals a feminist core within its baroque exterior.  

As the narrative progresses, Poor Things displays breathtaking shifts in genre and tone; its luridly provocative burlesque melting away to touchingly gentle romance and back again. The film also skilfully blends comedy with macabre horror and sci-fi and these shifts are mirrored in its cinematography. The opening scenes in London are shot in monochrome until the frame becomes suffused with boldly saturated colour which coincides with Bella’s increased mental development. Consequently, the film achieves an astonishing level of artifice; its painterly aesthetic a towering achievement. The highly stylised production values of the film recall the work of Powell and Pressburger whose A Matter of Life and Death (1946) also contained dramatic shifts from monochrome to colour. Like Lanthimos in this film, Powell and Pressburger were filmmakers who often prioritised artifice over naturalism in their work. Similarly, in the film’s colour transformation and its young-innocent-woman-on-a-journey-of-discovery narrative, it's not too hard to read Poor Things as a sexually explicit version of The Wizard of Oz- an L. Frank Baum Munchkin land on Viagra. 

 As he has shown previously, Lanthimos is a director who is comfortable with eccentricity and is not afraid of allowing anachronism and anomaly to counter realism in his films. So, in Poor Things, the Lisbon trams are transports of the sky; adding a touch of Steampunk retro-futurism into the mix. And, just as in The Favourite (2018), the unique visual style is augmented by the utilisation of fisheye and wide-angle lenses which distort perspective; an ingenious way for the film to visually replicate the discombobulated mind of its central character. The disorientating style of Robbie Ryan’s cinematography enables us to see through Bella’s eyes; to gaze in bewilderment at Bella’s out-of-kilter world and the vanity and hypocrisy of Victorian values. The heavily stylised visuals and fantasy element of the film, evokes the work of Terry Gilliam, whereas elsewhere we see touches of Tim Burton or even Wes Anderson in Lanthimos’ grand design. However, Lanthimos is a much better filmmaker than either Burton or Anderson, his oeuvre has none of their inconsistencies, and his films are much more thematically engaging and inventive.

Poor Things’ lavish cinematography is brilliantly complemented by its superb art design (James Price and Shona Heath) and costume design (Holly Waddington). Additionally, the dissonant musical score by Jerskin Fendrix adds to the film’s originality. The film’s arresting visual style firmly places Poor Things within the tradition of cinema as spectacle, and you really need to see the film on a big screen to enjoy the richly splendored textures of its tapestry and to fully appreciate its artistry.  

Riotously funny and deliciously dark and twisted, Poor Things is a demented, exquisite piece of cinema from a director whose outlandish imagination seemingly knows no bounds.  

See the Poor Things trailer here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlbR5N6veqw