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Yorgos Lanthimos has built a brand for making completely unorthodox movies from the moment he hit a critical breakthrough with Dogtooth. All this can be found in his move to directing films in the English language, going from The Lobster to his awards season hit The Favourite. Though with Poor Things it seems like he’s taking his completely subversive brand of filmmaking to a whole other level. It’s set on becoming one of the most surreal, vulgar, and outright debauched movies you’ll ever see, but underneath all the filth is a story about growth, freedom, and discovery – and simply put, one of the year’s best films.
In this bizarre new comedy from the Greek auteur, Emma Stone portrays Bella Baxter, a woman who had taken her life before having been crudely reanimated akin to Frankenstein. Under the guidance of the surgeon responsible for bringing her back from the dead, Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), Bella develops a childlike curiosity about every facet of the world around her, going from new ideals to the realization of her own sexuality. Finding an opportunity to explore the outside through the sleazy Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), Bella slowly realizes that there’s more to the world around her than she had already known.
From the opening of Poor Things alone, the imagery alone is especially provocative – the colour schemes stand out here more than they have in any other Lanthimos film to date. But also, you’re seeing weird hybrid animals ranging from a dog with a duck’s head, and many naked bodies lying dead. But all these grotesque images being seen with almost Victorian-era set and costume design makes Poor Things distinctive in Lanthimos’s filmography. Callbacks to the films of Terry Gilliam almost seem entirely inevitable, but knowing that Lanthimos is set out to create something so absurd from the first moments alone is the perfect setup for the kind of movie that Poor Things just so happens to be, even before all of the usual Lanthimos trademarks going from fisheye lenses to the peculiar framing come in.
All the weirdness will only continue from there onward. Lanthimos’s sense of humour is as dark as it’s ever been, but what comes out of that in Poor Things is a mockery of the conservative nature of “polite society” and a tale all about freedom. Lanthimos is no stranger to the complete debauchery as you’ll see from start to finish in here, but it also feels like an act of rebellion – which ultimately is where Poor Things finds its greatest successes. In telling the story of a woman finding reinvigoration through having literally been brought back to life, it also feels like we’re seeing Bella going out and learning just about everything she can about the world that she lives in, and deciding where she wants to go based on what she learns. Even amidst all the debauchery, it’s still an immensely thoughtful film that puts liberation and sex positivity at the forefront.
Being her second collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone delivers a career best role in Poor Things. For one, she’s great when you’re considering the material that she’s encapsulating in this performance, but with how much physicality the role demands from her, it also allows us to see her own skill as a physical performer. Nonetheless, it’s also the most that she’s put into a single role, especially when it comes to how the film centers itself on Bella’s own sexual awakening. With how Tony McNamara has structured Bella’s own odyssey, the brilliance is felt in realizing that it’s framed like her own coming-of-age, but all around it is clear that he is embracing the sex positivity of a story like this, where everyone plays polite on the outside, but is extremely dirty on the inside. This also results in brilliant work from Mark Ruffalo as the debauched lawyer Duncan Wedderburn, whose intentions for Bella can be read from the beginning as he embodies the insecurities of the upper class traditional male.
There’s a lot more than you could ever expect in a film like Poor Things, but Lanthimos delivers so much on the spot, and then some more. It’s every bit as weird as you can expect he’d take his concepts as you’ve seen from The Lobster or Dogtooth, but there’s still a level of thoughtfulness underneath it all that makes his work especially endearing. Not a single moment in Poor Things ever makes an effort to hide away how unorthodox the circumstances just as well happen to be, but this fairy tale is only made all the more enjoyable as a result of what the sum of all its parts adds up to be. It’s many things: bizarre, gory, sex-positive, perverted, flamboyant, these are all words one can say to sum it up quickly. And that’s a testament to the brilliance of Lanthimos’s film.
Watch the trailer right here.
All images via Searchlight Pictures.
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Screenplay by Tony McNamara, based on the novel Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer by Alasdair Gray
Produced by Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone
Starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, Jerrod Carmichael
Running Time: 141 minutes
Release Date: December 8, 2023
Cinema from the Spectrum 