"Poor Things" review — Voyage of the soul-searching monster
“I must go punch that baby.”
This film was featured in my Best Film of 2023 list.
Since the earliest days of the genre, science fiction writers have been plumbing the depths of the human soul by pushing their characters into fantastic situations to reveal something universal about human nature. Herbert investigates cults of personality and colonialism, Asimov explores the downfall of civilizations, and Lem breaks down the nature of love. “What does it mean to be human?” is the question so many of these stories come back to. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the very first science fiction novel, takes this question of human identity and makes it quite literal. The novel’s eponymous doctor constructions a living being out of dead tissue. Frankenstein has created a new living thing, but is that thing a person? The monster eventually goes on a soul-searching quest for identity, although he never really finds one, with the struggle to determine his place in the natural order imperfectly resolved. Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things is a Frankenstein narrative — complete with that novel’s love of dismembering corpses, electric reanimation, monstrous visages, and travels around Europe in search of meaning — albeit with significantly more surrealism, black humour, foul language, and sex.
In Poor Things, Frankenstein’s “monster” is a young woman named Bella Baxter (played by Emma Stone), whose cranial age is still catching up to that of her body. The doctor is Dr. Godwin Baxter (played by Willem Dafoe), whom Bella affectionately refers to as “God,” a character who resembles a monster in his appearance much more than Bella does. The two live in London, England, at some point in a non-specific part of the 20th century. At the beginning of the film, Bella is still learning to be a person. Her mind expands more and more every day: she begins to walk, to speak, to reason, and to discover the world around her for herself. All the while, she has the appearance of a grown adult. You see, Bella isn’t any ordinary person. In another life, Bella’s body belonged to that of a suicide victim, whose brain was removed by the delicate hands of Dr. Baxter after her death and replaced with the brain of an unborn infant. Because of this strange combination of mind and body, Bella does not develop like anyone before her, with the fullness of human experience rushing in on her all at once.
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| Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things. Photo via Searchlight Pictures. |
Within a few days of each other, the Baxter home receives two important guests who will change Bella’s life forever: medical student Max McCandles (played by Ramy Youssef) and lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (played by Marl Ruffalo). Max is hired by Baxter to watch Bella’s progress, keeping careful notes on what she does, eats, says, and how she changes. Eventually, as Bella becomes more rational, Max confesses his feelings for Bella to Baxter who agrees to let them marry. The lawyer Duncan, a foppish rogue of a man, arrives to draw up the marriage certificate but also attempts to woo Bella with promises of taking her to see the world, an opportunity she had been previously deliberately denied by Dr. Baxter. And in a moment, Bella decides to leave the trappings of London for the promise of Lisbon, Portugal, with Duncan in one hand and her suitcase in the other.
So begins Bella’s wild and wonderful odyssey around Europe and the Mediterranean, meeting new people, taking in new experiences, and discovering what sort of person she wants to be. With its stunning production design, marvellous sense of imagination, well-crafted narrative, and excellent performances, Poor Things is perhaps the best film in Yorgos Lanthimos’ already stunning career. The Greek filmmaker best known for his films The Lobster (2015), The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), and the Best Picture-nominated The Favourite (2018) has been one of the most exciting rising artists of the last decade. Poor Things, written by Tony McNamara and based on a novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray, is Lanthimos at his most ambitious and eccentric yet. Bella’s journey to self-discovery is a stunning odyssey, sending herself and the viewer into some comic and deeply uncomfortable situations surrounded by gorgeous landscapes and peculiar-looking cities. A string of excellent performances, a pitch-black script, and Lanthimos’ directorial signatures make Poor Things one of the most unique and strongest filmic offerings of the year.
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| The workshop of Dr. Baxter. Photo via Searchlight Pictures. |
Emma Stone — who previously starred in The Favourite as Abigail Masham, which earned her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination — leads the Poor Things company to great effect as Bell Baxter. Stone’s performance is incredibly physical and transformative, with her embodying many distinct phases in Bella’s psychological progression. The character is an oddity that Stone perfectly captures, riding a fine line between naivete and total self-assurance. As she develops her sense of personhood, Bella never discards the oddity inherent to her person, instead learns to live life on her own terms, much to the frustration of the men in her life who each want her to conform to their expectations for her. In Lisbon and, later, on an unwilling cruise along the Mediterranean Sea, Bella finds herself caught between her impulses and the confines of “polite society.” Initially enamoured with the hedonistic tendencies of Duncan Wedderburn, she begins to see the deeply insecure man under the surface. Duncan’s decline from a hedonistic womanizer to a love-scorned mess is one of the most entertaining arcs in the film. Mark Ruffalo is a comedic tour de force with impeccable timing and some ludicrous acting choices. As Bella and Duncan’s love affair begins to crumble, a certain British scientist isn’t taking Bella’s departure well.
Back in London, Dr. Baxter and McCandles are trying to figure out what to do with themselves in a life post-Bella. Willem Dafoe’s Dr. Baxter isn’t so much a “mad scientist,” but a deeply troubled scientist, himself a victim of his father’s experimentation. Baxter isn’t as cruel as the aforementioned Frankenstein, although his love of 19th-century pseudo-science is just as strong. Apart from his crowning experiment, the creation of Bella, Baxter’s home is also populated by a series of pitiful cross-bred animals, like one that combines the head of a goose with the body of a dog. The film’s first act, which is confined primarily to the Baxter home, is shot in black-and-white with high-contrast lighting, perhaps a visual nod to James Whale’s expressionist-influenced 1931 Frankenstein adaptation. Dafoe is always a joy to watch on screen, but his excellence as a character actor is used particularly well in this film. Ramy Youssef plays the soft-spoken Max McCandles, who works as Baxter’s diligent assistant throughout the whole film. While it would be easy for Youssef’s more grounded performance to be lost amidst the sea of strange faces and bold characters, McCandles’ more level-headed characterization makes him a refreshing break from the human absurdity found in the rest of the cast.
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| Willem Dafoe in Poor Things. Photo via Searchlight Pictures. |
No matter where the story transports the viewer — whether that be London, Lisbon, Paris, or Alexandria — Poor Things is utterly overwhelming to the eyes. In a year full of great-looking movies, Poor Things fights hard for a spot at the top. The visuals are dreamy and fantastic, utilizing a careful blend of cartoonish visual effects and massive practical sets to create its otherworldly environments. While the film claims to be set in a variety of notable European and Mediterranean locales, the cities themselves are hardly recognizable to their real-life counterparts, displaying a truly marvellous display of talent from production designers Shona Heath and James Price. Much of the film’s oddly shaped buildings and winding roads seem to channel influence from the architecture of Antoni Gaudí with its warped and wobbly neo-gothic aesthetic. The costume design continues the perversion of these period sensibilities by taking the fashion of the 19th century and twisting it into the most extreme possible version of itself. The work of costume designer Holly Waddington gives the impression of the film’s temporal setting, without ever confining the costume choices to what is strictly “accurate.”
These aesthetic eccentricities are carried over critically into the cinematography as well. The electric partnership between Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who previously worked on The Favourite, sees the film’s cinematography take on a new dimension of strangeness. Where The Favourite relished in ultra-wide angle lenses, Poor Things takes those impulses and makes them even more abrasive, with the film frequently dipping into fish-eye perspectives. Lanthimos and Ryan’s love of anamorphic lensing makes the film feel stretched across the screen unnaturally. They frequently use unconventional angles to complement the distinct performances and off-beat screenplay. The lighting and colour grading makes the garish colours from the production and costume designs stand out all the more, making Poor Things a technical marvel.
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| Bella in Lisbon. Photo via Searchlight Pictures. |
At the core of the whole film is the wonderful screenplay by Tony McNamara, who is yet another holdover from The Favourite. McNamara’s script is delightfully off-beat and endlessly funny. It’s full of memorable exchanges and cleverly crafted and fully realized characters. The humour always feels in service of its primary tale of existential longing and a search for meaning in a work that seems hostile. The film is also more comedically accessible than some of Lanthimos’ other work. Where the humour of Lanthimos’ previous films is often quite dry — which works to great effect there — Poor Things is a little more on-the-nose with its humour. In The Lobster, the distinction between what is humorous and what is sincere is often indistinguishable thanks to that film’s more grounded tone, but the absurdism of Poor Things allows the film to be a little more playful, which Lantimos and company certainly have fun with.
After Lisbon and the perilous Mediterranean Sea, Bella finds herself in Paris and then in London, completing two final stops in her voyage into the soul. In Paris, she finds herself in the care of Madame Swiney (played by the impeccable Kathryn Hunter), a section of the story which sees Bella confront the most base of men’s desires and the idealism of the 19th-century, including a desire to learn at university and her flirtations with socialism. And this is all before returning to London to confront Alfred “Alfie” Blessington (played by Christopher Abbott), the man to whom the woman who previously possessed her body was married. The film comes to a tense, fraught conclusion, which sees the ultimate ascendancy of Bella as a person enchanted with the idea of living.
In this Frankenstein-inspired tale, the monster searches for freedom from not only its maker but from the confines of a society that seems to desire nothing more than its destruction. But Poor Things is also a clever subversion of the myth of the monster, instead being a powerful ode to freedom through a string of delightfully comedic circumstances. The monster is reborn into something beautiful. As a creative force, Lanthimos reaches new heights with Poor Things. The filmmaking is supremely masterful, the technical aspects are marvellous, and the performances are some of the year’s most intense and transformative. Despite everything I’ve said, I don’t think I have quite managed to give Poor Things its proper justice. It’s a testament to the power of cinema: it needs to be seen to be believed. And I haven’t even talked about the artificial burp machine yet!
Poor Things is now playing in theatres.
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