Poor Things (2023)
dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
Rated: R
image: ©2023 Searchlight Pictures
I am Bella Baxter.
You are Bella Baxter.
We are all Bella Baxter.
Those declarations might seem strange, since, throughout Yorgos Lanthimos’s outrageous, mesmerizing, befuddling new film Poor Things, the Bella Baxter in question participates in some strange behavior. She stabs a corpse in the eyes with a scalpel while exclaiming with delight, “Squish! Squish!”; she works at a French whorehouse when she is in need of funds; on occasion, she masturbates at the breakfast table.
Based on a 1992 novel by surrealist Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, Lanthimos infuses his wacked-out aesthetic into this modern, gender-swapped retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by way of Hal Ashby’s Being There. Sitting through Poor Things is an incendiary, hypnotic experience. The film’s subject matter is about nothing less than the human compulsion for self-improvement.
The opening seconds of Poor Things would have made Alfred Hitchcock proud. In rich, vivid technicolor, we see a woman in Victorian garb plunge herself from a bridge into roiling waters below. It’s straight out of a Hitchcock fever dream. The woman is played by Emma Stone.
In the next sequence, shot in black and white, we see Emma Stone again. Her character is behaving like a toddler, smashing dishes on the ground and using language barely more sophisticated than baby talk. All the while, musician Jerskin Fendrix’s discordant, unsettling score pulses ominously on the soundtrack.
What’s going on here? That is a question no one who is watching Poor Things should be ashamed to ask, at least during the first 20 minutes of the movie. At that point, there is a reveal – one I will desperately attempt to avoid disclosing – which explains the nuts-and-bolts of what Stone’s Baxter has gone through, even while asking the audience to take a huge leap into absurdist logic. It’s a premise that must have seemed as outlandish to the first readers of Shelley’s aforementioned seminal 1818 gothic horror novel.
The man at the center of the procedure Bella has endured is Dr. Godwin Baxter, whom Bella calls God for short. Baxter himself looks like a patchwork man, not unlike Frankenstein’s own monster. His face is riddled with thick, jagged scars. The science-obsessed doctor is played by the incomparable Willem Dafoe, who uses his imposing visage and erratic energy to bring Baxter to quixotic life.
Baxter selects one of his medical students, Max McCandles, to help him with collecting data about Bella, like her nutritional intake and progress with her motor skills. At first, McCandles assumes he must show some sort of promise as a medical mind to be selected for such an important and secretive experiment. Baxter quickly disabuses his new assistant of that notion when he describes Max’s coursework as “a conventional mind striving to reach mediocrity.” (I’ve never felt so seen as when I heard that damning assessment of one’s skills at their chosen field.)
You don’t have to know the particulars of Bella’s reality to understand that her rapid development – due to the mysterious circumstances of her situation – from toddler to fully self-sufficient adult represents, within the movie, humankind’s endless striving for improvement and understanding of the human condition.
The source novel and screen adaptation were both written by men, and the film is directed by a man, but Emma Stone was heavily involved in the project’s gestation as both a producer and as the film’s lead. She was convinced to take on the extra responsibilities after working and building trust with Lanthimos on their 2018 collaboration, The Favourite. It shouldn’t be the case, but the story being told from a female perspective, instead of through a male character’s eyes, is revolutionary.
Emma Stone’s bonkers, idiosyncratic performance is a sight to behold in Poor Things. The actor has proven that she’s interested in taking on challenging, avant-garde material. That’s evidenced in her previous work with Lanthimos on The Favourite and the currently-airing series The Curse, which she produced alongside the show’s creators, Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie. The range that Stone accesses in her performance as Bella is complex and stretches the entire gamut of human behavior.
One of the criticisms to emerge of Poor Things is that, via the male gaze, this tale of female empowerment, liberation, and self-discovery depends entirely – as it often does when men are the ones telling the story – on a sexual awakening.
That criticism isn’t without merit. However, Bella’s tale of her own consciousness-raising goes far beyond a female character becoming a whole person after discovering sexual freedom. That does help Bella in her quest for emotional growth, but it works as a critique of the very patriarchy that defines women, even now, by their sexual usefulness to men.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Lanthimos’s setting is the quasi-Victorian era aesthetic that inexplicably comes with unimaginable scientific advancements and some of the wildest public transportation vehicles you’ve ever seen. It’s an ineffable blending of past, present, and a bizarre future, subtly making the connection that no matter how far we think we’ve come as a society, we are always trapped by the attitudes and standards of history.
Dr. Baxter’s own mangled, tortured body is another testament to backward thinking of the past, even when it’s done in the name of forward-looking science. Baxter is forced to make his own gastric juices and pump them through his body to help with digestion because his scientist father wanted to learn – in order to “discover what no one knew” – if a human could survive without them. B.F. Skinner would have been proud. Gastric juices, as Baxter has reinforced to him every day of his life, are very necessary for human survival.
If you’ve seen any of Lanthimos’s other work, like The Lobster or The Killing of a Sacred Deer, you’ll be expecting the blackest, silliest of humor to accompany his otherworldly visions. Poor Things delivers. Among Baxter’s ghoulish experiments is a rooster’s body with the head of a dog sown onto it. The moment when we hear the rooster barking is the moment when we determine that we can’t take anything we see here too seriously.
And yet, what Bella learns during her adventures abroad to exotic locales like Lisbon and Paris are heartfelt and touching. She’s in the not-so-tender care of a cad named Duncan Wedderburn – a man who admits his initial plan, before becoming obsessed with the child-like Bella, was to use her sexually for a few months and then to cast her off for a new conquest. The two become penniless during their journeys because Bella gives all of Duncan’s money away to the poor after she learns of the scourge of poverty.
The philosophy of Marxism shines in one of the best moments of the movie. Bella tells Duncan, who is berating her for selling her body in a Parisian brothel, that she is her “own means of production.”
Kathryn Hunter, who I will never forget as the three weird sisters in Joel Coen’s 2021 adaptation of The Tragedy of Macbeth, is pitch perfect as the world-weary and world-wise Madame Swiney, who runs the brothel where Bella takes up work.
Hunter, who is a hypnotic performer, illustrates perfectly the ethos of Lanthimos’s modus operandi in Poor Things. Like high fashion models, the director creates visions that want to be looked at, that need to be looked at for their strange and unsettling qualities. Hunter is the personification of Lanthimos’s aesthetic.
At the same time, Lanthimos explores facets of the human condition and why we’re all here: to learn as much as we can about ourselves and to make life less miserable for our fellow humans. Along with Marxism, nihilism is explored through a character Bella meets on her travels. Harry, who befriends our hero during an ocean cruise, tells his new friend that humans are cruel beasts, nothing more and nothing less. We are born as cruel beasts and we die as cruel beasts.
Bella disagrees. We might be cruel – one of the most profound observations Bella makes during her journey is the human desire to be cruel to someone who is already clearly suffering – but over the course of seven or eight decades on earth, a process that Bella embodies over the course of a few short months, humans contain the capacity to learn empathy and compassion for others that raises us above the crude lust for money, sex, and power that can easily consume us.
And, in the world of Poor Things, if some among us are consumed with the petty human traits of domination and subjugation that have plagued our species since we first crawled out of the mud, Bella can fix that, too. Whoever refuses to show compassion and basic dignity to his fellow humans can be reduced to the station of a bleating barnyard animal. Bella, now fully formed in mind, body, and spirit, is happy to facilitate that transformation in anyone who delights in cruelty to others.
Why it got 4 stars:
- Yorgos Lanthimos is at his most unhinged and aesthetically daring with Poor Things. The shear audacity of it is a wonder to behold.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I never even mentioned him in the proper review, but Mark Ruffalo, as Mr. Wedderburn, is hysterical here.
- We get our Lanthimos dance sequence, and it’s every bit as weird as you could hope.
- The wild fish-eye lenses that Lanthimos’s cinematographer, Robbie Ryan — who worked with the director on The Favourite as well as shooting Marriage Story and C’mon C’mon — uses throughout Poor Things are disorienting in the best way imaginable.
- One of the best lines, delivered by Ruffalo, of the movie: “You don’t know what bananas are, you’ve never heard of chess, yet you know what ‘empirically’ means.”
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I really would have liked to have caught this on the big screen, but I saw it at home on the couch via a FYC screener link.