After a brief detour into the genre of the historical biopic via the relatively strait-laced The Favourite (2018), Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has reentered his familiar stomping grounds of the strange, grotesque, and whimsical with his new film, Poor Things. There are certainly points of continuation from Lanthimos’ previous project—Emma Stone again stars in another script written by Tony McNamara—but the content of the new film would make The Favourite’s Queen Anne (Olivia Coleman) shit her britches.
Part steampunk, part Victorian bildungsroman, Poor Things traces the life of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a composite woman created by the mad scientist Godwin “God” Baxter (Willem Defoe) by splicing together the body of a pregnant woman and the brain of her unborn fetus. It gets weirder. After a period of confinement in Godwin’s laboratory-house in London, Bella’s engagement to her “father’s” well-intentioned assistant Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) is disrupted when she elopes with the itinerant lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). Their sex-filled adventure sweeps viewers through bizarre, steampunk versions of Lisbon, Alexandria, Marseilles, and Paris.
Poor Things is carried by the charismatic performances of its lead. Bella is a type of character that Lanthimos has experimented with before, most notably in Dogtooth (2009), a deeply disturbing film about parents who imprison their children in their home. Poor Things can in some ways be seen as a sequel, with Bella as the daughter who attempts to escape at the end of Lanthimos’ earlier film. Stone brilliantly conveys the wonder, delight, confusion, and disappointment that are all inherent in her character, a precocious child forced into adulthood and thrust upon the world. The cinematography and mise en scène of Poor Things seem to embody Bella’s perspective; the frequent use of fisheye shots and the garish colors of the scenery remind us of what the world might look like to a child who has spent her life shut in a dark house.
Ruffalo’s Duncan Wedderspoon is the ultimate slimeball, an erstwhile womanizer desperately clutching at the last vestiges of a younger self who might well have fit into the mold of Michel Poiccard in Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960). Only momentarily does his charm mask his pathetic, deeply unfulfilled (and incredibly funny) inner self. Duncan’s parasitic tendencies are hinted at by his impossible-to-place accent. Eventually, it becomes clear that he modifies it at each stop on the trip, taking on British, Spanish, and French tinges at the appropriate locations. Dafoe, meanwhile, is truly a delight in his role as Godwin Baxter, providing bitterly dark comedy through his unabashed frankness and its contrast with the mild McCandles. The only disappointment is Jerrod Carmichael, whose character Harry Astley is poorly acted and comes across as unbearably pretentious.
Ultimately, this wild film has a serious topic at its core in its exaggerated (but, in the age of social media, increasingly relevant) contrast between a sheltered inner-girlhood and an outwardly adult-presenting body, eagerly hypersexualized and objectified by men. Poor Things’ investigation, unfortunately, falls short of adding anything truly substantive on this subject. Lanthimos toys with suggesting a second-wave feminist solution of sexual liberation—Bella wields her sexual appeal for her own sensual (and monetary) benefit—but whether this message is valid coming from a middle-aged male director is dubious. For all its eye-popping set design and flashes of genuine hilarity and tenderness, the film’s failure to deeply explore the questions it does such a wonderful job of raising (despite its gratuitous runtime) leaves Poor Things a bit stale.
