Poor Things is an episodic, picaresque movie with horror overtones. The movie uses the story of Frankenstein's monster to explore moral and ethical issues. In many ways, the film is squarely situated within the territory of Rousseau's Emile or Voltaire's Candide -- Poor Things is a filmed Bildungsroman with an emphasis on carnal knowledge. (The movie is already famous for its many explicit sex scenes). The picture feels somewhat formless and has a strange coda in its last twenty minutes that seems excessive in all respects, a nod to horror movie conventions. That said, the movie is beautifully produced on all levels -- indeed, if anything it is almost too visually opulent. Emma Stone is excellent as Bella Baxter, the Frankenstein monster; Willem Dafoe is poignant as her hideously scarred creator -- she calls him God. Mark Ruffalo makes an effective caddish man-about-town and the movie features superb cameo appearances by Kathryn Hunter as the Dickensian brothel-keeper Madame Swiney and Hannah Schygulla as a philosophical older woman that Bella meets on a cruise across the Mediterranean. The picture is a voluptuous visual feast with elaborate belle epoque (Jugendstil) sets, radiant seascapes and cities under lowering, turbulent skies that look like scenery in paintings by Albrecht Altdorfer or Jacob Ruisdael -- purplish clouds are ripped asunder by apocalyptic beams of light and strange lighter-than-air vessels ply the heavens. Buildings seem half-melted with colossal figures draped over doorways and strange baroque curves and expressive round window like eyes. The cities of London, Lisbon, Alexandria, and Paris, to name some of the locations, are depicted in terms of complicated courtyards, peculiar and eccentric flights of stairs and great fairy-tale facades half-visible in the distance, sun-gilded domes and minarets. The movie is populated with various grotesques; the habitues of the brothel where Bella works are particularly memorable, deformed looking apparitions with bulging, hideous eyes. Small horror film details abound in the corners of the frame -- there are ducks with pig heads, dogs spliced to swans, and all sorts of grotesques manufactured by God, Bella's creator. The movie is an unstable combination of ravishing pictorial beauty and disturbingly hideous imagery -- people perform surgery on themselves and there are forty or so cadavers lying around in various states of disassembly. When Bella returns to God's laboratories in his wildly curvilinear palace, she inhales deeply -- "Formaldehyde," she says, the smell of home. The movie is somewhat schematic and makes its points without any subtlety but it's beautiful written, with elaborate, highly stylized diction and speeches that never falter with respect to wit and intelligence. Clearly every element of this movie has been carefully imagined and lovingly transferred onto the screen for maximum authority and effect. The movie is heartless, but this is to be expected. As with all other movies made by director Yorgos Lanthimos, you watch with a coldly clinical eye with your emotions mostly disengaged so that you can follow the film's argument. It's like reading something by Alexander Pope -- the rococo effects all fall into perfect place and snap shut with rhymed couplets; the imagery is almost too rich -- it's a feast for the eye and mind but you remain strangely disengaged from the grotesque events depicted.
Beginning in black-and-white (after a spectacular opening shot of a woman plunging to her death from a Victorian-era bridge -- the water of the river looks dark and vicious like the Styx), the movie chronicles the adventures of Bella Baxter, God's creation. Dafoe's character has fished the suicide, a woman named Victoria Blessington, out of the river, dissected her belly, and removed her full-term fetus. God has, then, placed infant's brain in the adult woman's cranium. The result is a beautiful fully mature woman with the mind of an infant. The movie chronicles how this infant's brain develops and how she comes to full consciousness as a human being -- in effect, the film is the story of one person's education from infancy to maturity. In its first fifteen minutes, the picture channels The Miracle Worker showing a willfully violent and destructive toddler in a woman's body. Sex begins the baby's education -- first, Bella, as she is called by her creator, begins to masturbate, then, she makes advances on her tutor, a young man that God has hired to document the phases in her intellectual growth. God wants Bella to remain always at his side -- he loves her with the suffocating warmth of a parent. But he is willing to regulate her sexual passions by espousing her to his assistant -- he sees this as part of her education. Bella is sexually adventurous however, and wants to have adventures, mostly with respect to "wild jumping" which is what she calls sexual intercourse. She elopes with Mark Ruffalo's character, a seducer who quickly learns that he has bitten off way more than he can chew. Bella is sexually insatiable and wears him out. She is also intellectually adventurous -- we see her reading Emerson and demanding that she learn about philosophy. Like the young lord Siddhartha, she has no knowledge of human suffering. But in Alexandria, she gazes down into a slum that is like a hideous open grave and sees corpses and women with dead and dying babies. Horrified by this spectacle, she gives away all of the money that she and her lover have accumulated. By this time, the ruthless lawyer played by Ruffalo is smitten by her, jealous, and possessive and he's appalled when he finds she has given all their treasure to the poor -- actually to a couple of dishonest ship stewards. Bella ends up in Paris where she works in a brothel. These scenes allow the filmmaker to insert a whole panoply of perverse sex acts into the picture, imagery that is either comical or disturbing. The lawyer can't abide Bella's whoring and so she gives him some money and tells him that he should return to London. After a time, Bella learns that God is dying of cancer and so she returns home to be by his side. (By this time, she has become something of a feminist and socialist as well.) She meets her tutor again, a gentle and kind man whom she is now willing to marry -- she has, as it were, sown her wild oats. On her wedding day, a man appears to disrupt her nuptials; this is Victoria Blessington's husband, the officer married to the heroine when she threw herself off the bridge in the movie's opening scene. The soldier asserts his claim on Bella and inexplicably she walks away from her wedding to the mild-manner and kindly tutor and to join the sadistic military officer at his remote manor -- his chest is a salad of medals and he constantly brandishes a gun. The depraved British military officer threatens his servants with a revolver and plots to surgically mutilate Bella --he plans to amputate her clitoris. The military man is a dyed-in-the-wool villain of the most villainous sort and, I think, a sort of blemish on the film; this stuff is too histrionic and exaggerated even by the terms of this movie. It's also baffling that Bella, who now has extensive experience of the world, would voluntarily join this man, a fellow who is obviously vicious and cruel. However, the final scenes with the military officer set up the movie's horror film finale -- a climax that is little like the ending of Freaks.
It seems like about half of the film involves sex scenes of various kinds. Bella's education is sexual and she constructs her sense of self around these liaisons. Emma Stone is fearless and, like Isabelle Huppert, willing to expose herself, both literally and figuratively, in ways that would be inaccessible to most actresses. The role requires her to develop from a uninhibited, monstrous, infant into a sophisticated courtesan and woman-of-the world; the amplitude of her performance is astounding and she throws herself without reservation into all phases of the character's sexual pilgrimage . The amount of sex and nudity in the movie is a throw-back to the seventies, when actresses were far more uninhibited about their appearances onscreen -- whether the amount of sex in Poor Things is excessive, that is, a bad thing or good thing will depend upon the tastes of the viewer. But this aspect of the film is its most notable feature. By contrast, Willem Dafoe plays a neutered monster -- he seems to be have been systematically tortured by his gruesome father, apparently Baron Frankenstein himself: at one point, for instance, he father broke both of his thumbs when he was a child to see how if the bones would remain infantile in size when the rest of his body developed into adulthood. (This is not the worst of the things that were done to him.) As with all the details amassed by the movie, the make-up and prosthetic work used with Dafoe is remarkable -- the character has to be horribly mutilated but also endearing and his features need to be recognizable and expressive beneath the make-up. All of the film's incidental features are profoundly intentional and aggregate toward making the effects that the movie wishes to achieve -- this applies to Dafoe's make-up, the Brueghel-like animal composite monsters, the sets and brooding, ominous music, even the titles that have an elongated, somewhat tortured appearance. Everything is designed and engineered exquisitely to create an effect that is both fascinating, but, also, stifling. The movie's images and scene-setting are so lush and detailed as to be overpowering and it's a relief when this thing is over.
The film is based on a book by the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray (he died in 2019). Gray was an important novelist in his time, best known for his first book Lanark, but, also, the author of a number of other novels, including Poor Things. Gray's work derives from Tristram Shandy and is full of idiosyncratic post-modern devices -- narratives are embedded in essays with footnoted commentaries on commentaries. Yorgis Lanthimos seems to have extracted the post-Modern shenanigans from Poor Things and, in fact, films the central narrative in the novel as if it were a work by Dickens or Flaubert -- that is, the playfulness of Gray's approach to this lurid material is suppressed. I don't view this as a defect, but it's different from the author's vision of the novel -- as should be the case with a fully imagined film. Some parts of the movie that don't work, in my estimation, seem to derive from elements of the book that have been retained but, not, as it were, fully digested. (This includes the horror-film coda involving the vicious Major Blessington and several minor characters, including another version of Bella, a beautiful girl also created by God who is supposed to correct the willful and headstrong aspects of the heroine, but who remains a baffling cipher in the picture.)
Simply put, Poor Things dwarfs the other movies released in the summer of 2023. It's infinitely better than Barbie, a silly and frivolous picture (but also somehow heavy and tedious), better than Oppenhemer which is well-made but ultimately inconsequential, much lighter on its feet than the grave and death-inflected Killers of the Flower Moon. It's undoubtedly the best picture of the year from a technical standpoint. But it's not exactly likeable and, despite all the sex, the film is very frigid. But this is by design. Poor Things is self-contained, insular, and it doesn't care if you like it or not.
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