Poor Things Review: One Of Lanthimos' and 2023's Best Movies

Ken Jones, OnScreen Blog Chief Film Critic

A woman stands on the side of a bridge and jumps to her death in the water below. This is the opening scene of Poor Things, the latest film from director Yorgos Lanthimos and his first since 2018’s The Favourite.

At first, I wondered if this opening scene might be a flashforward to the end of the film and the fate of its protagonist and the entire film will explain how we arrived at this point, but it is actually the ending of one life and the beginning of another in this take on the Frankenstein tale.

The protagonist is introduced to the audience circuitously as Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a young woman whom an eccentric doctor has reanimated, Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Godwin has brought in a medical student, Max McCandles (Rami Yousef), to help chart and monitor Bella’s growth and progress. Largely confined to Godwin’s house, Bella is incredibly naïve, but as she learns, she desires to know more about the world outside her confines.

Eventually, Godwin, whom Bella literally calls “God” (a nickname, but he is also her creator), convinces McCandles to marry Bella, but before that can happen, she is whisked away by the lawyer who was drawing up a contract between Godwin and McCandles, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). By Wedderburn’s side, and still intending to marry McCandles when she returns, Bella traverses the globe and experiences personal growth and self-awakening, both physically and mentally.

Bella is a meaty role for Stone, essentially portraying the same character at different ages without drastically altering her appearance through makeup or having a child actress portray a younger version of her.

She starts as a full-grown woman with a fresh, child-like view of the world. She walks stiffly, struggles to compose complete sentences, and acts tempestuously when she does not get her way. In this way, she is very much like Frankenstein’s monster, in ways similar to both the 1931 classic horror film and Mel Brooks’ comedy Young Frankenstein.

As the film progresses and Bella learns more about the world and herself, her appearance and clothing change, and her way of speaking and thinking improves as she reads and interacts with more people. The Bella we see at the end of the film has undergone a dramatic transformation, and the steps to get there are natural and easy for the audience to perceive.

Stone is allowed to exhibit a wide range of acting here. The Favourite netted an Oscar win for the lead actress, Olvia Coleman. Emma Stone was a supporting actress in that film and received an Oscar nomination. Her starring turn here may very well result in another Oscar win for a Lanthimos leading lady.

A big part of her self-awakening is also sexual. This film is highly sexual. She discovers sexual pleasure on her own early on at Godwin’s house, but it is not until she is out in the world with Duncan that this truly blossoms for her. At one point, after a furious love-making session, she wonders aloud, “Why don’t people just do this all the time?”

Bella’s sexuality is played for a lot of laughs at many different points, but, notably, she has none of the preconceptions, cultural shame, or stigma surrounding sex that the average person does and that it is a completely natural and normal thing to her.

While not all of her sexual activity is with Duncan, most of the film's middle portion revolves around their relationship, which is purely sexual for Bella but is increasingly romantic for Duncan. Ruffalo also gives a performance worthy of an Oscar nomination, playing Duncan as a foppish cad.

He boasts of his sexual talents, boasts of his intelligence, boasts about anything about himself, really. Of course, much of that is keeping up appearances, and his talents are wildly overstated in most cases. He is incredibly melodramatic, both when he is with Bella and even when they eventually part ways, unable to move beyond being completely smitten with her despite his protestations of being a worldly man.

Dafoe and Yousef also give strong supporting performances in the film, with the two of them being the only ones who know Bella’s true origins; to everyone else, she is this delicate naïf that they continually underestimate.

Dafoe’s Godwin and his relationship with Bella are morally complex, though shaded toward sympathetic as his personal background is brought to light. He is physically deformed and a product of his tormented upbringing. Also, his house is filled with other mad scientist experiments and oddities that consist of heads of various animals attached to the bodies of other animals. Bella is merely the next logical progression from other experiments he has walking around his property, like a dog with the head of a duck and other Dr. Moureau-lite creations.

Visually, this is the most adventurous and creative that Lanthimos has gotten. Apart from the opening scene on the bridge, most of the first third of the film is in black and white before eventually switching to color when Bella leaves Godwin, almost like a twist on The Wizard of Oz. Fisheye cameras, which were a part of The Favourite, are also regularly employed here.

The sets and costumes are lavish and extravagantly Victorian; the dresses may have the puffiest sleeves ever seen in a motion picture. There is also a steampunk quality to the film; there are various shots of zeppelins flying above a city and taxis or public transportation that are set on tracks above the city streets. It feels like Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan are channeling a Terry Gilliam aesthetic with the volume turned up to eleven.

This film reunites Lanthimos with screenwriter Tony McNamara, who also co-wrote The Favourite and received an Oscar nomination for that work. The film is wildly funny, especially in how it allows Bella to create her own form of English that is an amalgam of the simple and complex; the way Bella speaks and what she calls certain things is another expression of how she views the world.

Credit here also belongs to author Alasdair Gray, as this film is an adaptation of his novel. On discovering that this film was coming out, a personal friend informed me that the book had been lodged in her brain for 20 years and described it as “artistically grotesque, sympathetic, and vile”, which makes it the perfect kind of source material for director Yorgos Lanthimos.

I had high expectations for Poor Things, with some saying that this is the best film that Lanthimos has made to date. That may depend on personal preference, as I am still partial to The Lobster, but I was certainly not disappointed or let down by this film. It is one of the year’s best and is a fitting addition to the theater of the absurd that is the filmography of Yorgos Lanthimos. It is also a film that has Emma Stone poised to cement herself as the defining actress of her generation.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

(Poor Things is currently making the rounds at film festivals, including Venice and Telluride. It is scheduled to release in theaters in December.)