What the hell is director Yorgos Lanthimos's Poor Things about? If you know Lanthimos's work (Dogtooth, The Lobster, The Killing of the Sacred Deer, and The Favourite), you know the question is relevant because Lanthimos's movies tend to be odd, alluring and unsettling.
Cineastes have tagged Lanthimos, as part of the Greek Weird Wave, perhaps an appropriate designation.
So, before we go further, let's clarify. Based on a 1992 novel by the late Alasdair Gray, Poor Things deals with the ways in which Victorian society tried but failed to repress female sexuality. The movie also draws creative fuel from the alarming dangers of scientific thinking that blanches emotion from decision-making, in this case the objectivity that produces new species and fiddles with old ones.
Lanthimos creates a film that can evoke the work of Terry Gilliam and David Lynch. But Poor Things stands as Lanthimos's singular creation, a whacked-out visual cornucopia from which a coming-of-age tale topples.
The story in a nutshell: Taking a novelistic approach, Lanthimos begins with a Frankenstein-like fantasy. Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) extracts an infant's brain from the body of a pregnant woman who committed suicide by leaping off a bridge. Said brain is then transplanted into the body of the woman who jumped to her death. The body is reanimated.
Baxter's creation -- called Bella Baxter and played by Emma Stone -- refers to her creator as God, a telling abbreviation of the doctor’s first name. A badly scarred face makes Dr. Baxter look like he might have been sewn together by a mad seamstress.
Needing an assistant to chronicle his work with Bella, Baxter recruits one of his students (Ramy Youssef) to chart Bella's development. Youssef's Max McCandless soon becomes Bella's betrothed.
But wait. Dissatisfied with the cloistered existence Baxter imposes on her, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a happily debauched fellow whose intentions are blatantly dishonorable.
To dwell on more of the plot would turn this review into a novel. Lanthimos tales two hours and 21 minutes to watch Bella learn about the world's pleasures (pastries and sex) and its evils (exploitation and cruelty).
To give you an idea about Bella's introduction to sexual pleasure, note this: It features a masturbatory scene involving apples. I'll say no more. Bella refers to intercourse as "furious jumping." She approaches sexual exploration with vigor. Neither guilt nor shame shackle Bella's libido.
Lanthimos divides the movie into sections that revolve around Bella's adventures with Wedderburn, a visit to Alexandria, a stint in a Paris house of ill repute, and a return to London where the story reaches its conclusion, which proves as strange as all that preceded it.
For the movie to work, Stone had to commit to a role that required her to speak in a stilted (often funny style), appear nude, and emerge herself in the transformation from a naive innocent to a fully realized woman. It's one hell of a performance and it's matched by the work of Ruffalo and Dafoe, not to mention a cast of supporting actors that incudes Jerrod Carmichael, Kathryn Hunter, and Hanna Schygulla.
It falls to Youssef to portray the film's good-hearted innocent. Even a bizarre story needs some kind of anchor.
Lanthimos has a made a movie in which the cinematography (in black-and-white and color), the production design (fantastical), the costumes (particularly Bella's dresses) can be delightful, ominous, and even a bit repulsive.
Perhaps he employs one too many fish-eye lenses and the movie could have been shorter, but nearly every frame offers something for the eye to investigate. Godwin's genetic mutations appear like props. They include chicken dogs, for example. A steam-driven carriage moves through the streets of London with a severed horses head attached.
I took them as visual jokes, the absurd consequences of scientific experimentation and hubris.
Screenwriter Tony McNamara deserves credit for wrestling Gray's novel into a movie that Lanthimos fills with visual invention, twisted wit, and bizarre surprises.
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