Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos loves playing the role of naughty provocateur. He’s a storyteller unafraid of sexual frankness and the pivotal role it plays in our lives and in our societal foundations, like a descendant of Lars von Trier or Catherine Breillat. Mind you, Lanthimos has been embraced by Hollywood in ways that Von Trier and Breillat never have or will, and his films have become easier to swallow over time, more dreadful in the mind than on the screen. I quite enjoy the psychological landscapes of his films, the demented ways they lay plain the pathetic nature of the human condition. Poor Things is something quite different though. Unlike The Lobster or The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Poor Things looks at the inherent cruelty in this world and dares to imagine something better. Something good, even.
The movie stars Emma Stone, one of the few genuine Millennial movie stars. Stone’s stardom crested on her incredible comedic timing, and when she began showing a gift for dramatic heft in films like Birdman, we knew she was here to stay as long as she wanted. At 35, Stone appears to be at her most fearless and her most curious, taking on projects of intense strangeness and physical vulnerability. This reaches its peak in Poor Things, where she plays Bella Baxter, a dead woman reanimated with the brain of the baby that she used to carry. This premise clues us in early on to the level of absurdity that we’re working with. Bella’s “father” is a medical researcher named Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). It was Godwin who found the pregnant corpse of a woman in the sea, and chose to bring her back to life in this bizarre way.
The result is that Bella is an adult in body alone, with the mind of a developing infant. Her motor skills and emotional understanding are lacking, and her dependence on Godwin total. When Godwin hires one of his medical students, Max (Ramy Youssef), to study her quick development, Bella begins to learn that there is a world outside of Godwin’s macabre collection of cadavers and bifurcated animal bodies. When Bella meets a mischievous lawyer named Duncan Wedderburn (a hilarious Mark Ruffalo), she discovers the joy of sex. Her love of this new physical activity influences her to join Duncan on a journey of the unknown, much to the chagrin of Godwin and Max. Traveling throughout Europe, Bella finally sees the world in all its beauty, but she’s also introduced to its horrors. Those horrors include the way society treats its female participants, and she soon seeks to liberate herself from this narrow-minded worldview.
The film is an adaptation of a novel from Scottish author Alasdair Gray, and the screenplay is written by Tony McNamara. McNamara was one of two writers on Lanthimos’s The Favourite, and he also was the creator of the now-cancelled Hulu series The Great. His specialty is prestige period pieces cut with crude, expletive-laden dialogue. You often get a laugh from some stately, erudite nobleman using the word “fuck” or “cock”. McNamara is a good writer but his skills lie in wit not depth, and in trying to pen this fable of enlightenment, any emotional payoff crashes on the rocks of its self-effacing irony, or is force-fed through the most didactic means. Indeed, Poor Things does feel caught in between wanting to be taken seriously and wanting to be a thumb in the eye of the average period drama. Its existence in this no man’s land is occasionally tedious.
Lanthimos’s singular vision boosts the film’s considerable palette, and while the mixing of regal and grotesque imagery has become a staple of his filmography, the scale here is much larger than his previous work. The Greek director used to be as harsh as his direct influences – as brutal as Michael Haneke for instance – but that is understandably muted when working within the confines of studio filmmaking. Poor Things seems bound by necessity to leave its audience with a happy ending, even while its themes espouse the tragedies of our existence. Lanthimos takes the classic Frankenstein tale and transforms it from a story about creation into one about recreation. In trying to tie this theme into society’s misogyny at large, the execution is a little clunky. It’s a bit telling that Poor Things is at its best when it leans into its freakish details, marinating in its own unorthodox nature.
The good news is that Poor Things is astonishing to look at. Robbie Ryan’s cinematography splashes wondrous color across the alluring and strange sets from production designers Shona Heath and James Price. Their creations, formal but otherworldly, reflects the script’s demented aesthetic, but it finds its own sense of beauty throughout, and Lanthimos’s peerless vision transcribes the euphoria of Bella’s sense of discovery much more economically than McNamara does with his script. Poor Things is much grander than The Favourite, more ambitious narratively and cinematically, but the fit between McNamara’s stately dialogue and Lanthimos’s grotesqueries is less harmonious, more awkward.
As Bella, Stone is completely given to the role, in all its physicality and emotional complexity. She’s able to access the depth in Bella that the screenplay lacks, and her commitment gives the film proper catharsis. If The Favourite hinted that Stone was interested in more challenging material, Poor Things confirms her ability to master it. In a career already filled with remarkable work, this ranks near the top. Dafoe and Ruffalo, both playing vessels of knowledge for Bella, are sufficiently funny in their roles, each leaning into the idiosyncratic, playing the rhythms that make Lanthimos’s humor so rich. In an extended cameo, Hanna Schygulla shares a few scenes with Stone, as wise old woman who is the first to explain to Bella that a woman doesn’t only have to do what a man requests of her. A treat for any Fassbinder heads out there.
The film’s middle portion feels particularly stretched, and for most of the film’s second half, I was beginning to feel browbeat by the insistence of its themes. Its take on feminism feels shallow – it’s preoccupation mostly with sex really gives away that the writer and director are men – and in the end, Bella’s transformation feels a bit too easy. But there’s a lot to enjoy here. The biting humor is welcome against the shocking images, and the collection of performances – led by Stone – are top notch, but Poor Things falls short on an emotional level, failing to pierce its own meticulous shell.
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos