Poor Things

Rated R for nudity, sex, evisceration, and scientific malfeasance.

After having been brought back to life, a young woman leaves her father and her fiancé behind, in order to run off with a charming scoundrel on a whirlwind tour of the continent. Free from the prejudices of her times, she embarks on a journey of self-actualization and liberation.

A skewed take on the story of Frankenstein, Poor Things follows Bella Baxter, a strange woman living with her father in a massive manse in the middle of Victorian London. The result of an unorthodox experiment where the living brain of a fetus was switched with the dead brain of its own recently deceased mother, she is new to the world. The experiment was performed by Bella’s patchwork grotesquerie of a father and creator, a man who is a butcher, a surgeon, and a decidedly mad scientist, named Dr. Godwin Baxter, a man Bella knows as “God.”

Physically, God is a crazy quilt of horror to look upon, but mentally, he is a giant towering amongst men, like Dr. Frankenstein within the body of his monster. The child of a scientific madman himself, and the tortured result of multiple experiments, he has a twisted and bent body, and a face that looks like it was chopped into ragged pieces, which were then haphazardly stitched back together.

Growing up in isolation, walled off within the manse from the outside world, surrounded by a small of herd of stitched-together hybrid animals like a chicken-dog, a pig-rooster, and a duck-goat, Bella is a grown woman, but she behaves like a toddler at first. She grunts and screams, hooting wildly while breaking things, when she isn’t gleefully dancing, and peeing wherever as needed. Bella is messy and curious, impolite and violent, and she lurches around the house like a damaged puppet. But Bella’s curiosity grows, as does her mental acuity, and soon, the cage that is God’s house can no longer contain her. She seeks knowledge and experience, to know herself, to know the world, to see things, and to meet people who genuinely love her, and don’t just want to control her.

Because God is just one of several men who bend their will toward controlling Bella over the course of her life. There’s also Max McCandles, a student of God, who takes a position as God’s research assistant, but ends up falling in love with Bella, or at least, decides that he wants to possess her, so he proposes marriage, all with God’s blessing. Then there’s General Alfie Blessington, a wealthy aristocrat and a cruel sociopath, he is a soldier and a socialite, who knows Bella from her former life as his wife, Victoria Blessington, a woman who killed herself while pregnant. Alfie professes love for her, but he desires nothing more than to collar her as his property, through force if need be. Finally, there’s Duncan Wedderburn, a preening buffoon, but also an unexpectedly sexy and very charismatic Lothario. He whisks Bella away on a lavish world tour that mostly consists of very vigorous sex in a variety of positions—an activity Bella refers to as “furious jumping.” He also ends up falling in love with her, or at least, he needs to control her once she stops fawning over him, and starts to assert her own agency.

Emma Stone is truly incredible here, playing a very difficult role, one that could have very easily gone wrong. She is wild and unpredictable, starting out big and broad, an infant driven by pure id, and then, over the course of the film’s story, slowly reigns the character in little by little, physically and verbally. She does this, all while maintaining that wild spark in her eyes, until at last, Bella is fully in command of herself, a person of power and control, and much like her father and creator before her, she is a giant amongst men.

It’s an incredible performance.

And the whole time, you root for her. Because while Bella is a grown woman, she is pushed by controlling men into living her life like a child. Her redemption comes by taking control of her own life. She is a bulldozer against their cages and expectations. She steamrolls through them all. And the whole time, she’s extremely likable, a good person, albeit one without a filter, kind and optimistic, and despite seeing the stark and horrible reality of the outside world, she’s willing to assert her newly discovered power when necessary, often without a second thought. It’s a fantastic and extremely vulnerable bit of work, and Stone throws her all into creating the character.

It’s amazing.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos, adapting a novel by Alasdair Gray, loves to depict that glaring contrast between the expectations of polite society and the ugly and messy reality of humanity, and much like in his previous films, he positively revels in that disparity here.

Beautiful and grand, wonderfully bizarre in design, cinematography, costumes and script, Poor Things takes place in a world of wonders and horrors, a twisted picture-book of a vaguely steampunk fantasy Victorian era. It’s gaudy and erotic, captivating and sweet, often discordant and screeching, occasionally violent, and grossly repellent at times. It is a world of equally great beauty and inequity, one that leaps at the chance to take advantage of the pure and the innocent, the lost and the searching.

Especially if that person is a woman.

Like Frankenstein, Poor Things is about the humanization of the monster, but this time, the monster is not just a woman, but women in general. Alasdair Gray's novel, which I haven’t read, is apparently a gender-swapped retelling of the classic story by the mother of science fiction, Mary Shelley. Frankenstein is a story that is essentially about power, showing how Dr. Frankenstein was corrupted by his short-sighted quest to try to take the ability to create life from Mother Nature, from women. The resulting violence and anger that drive that story is what happens when women are erased from the creation of life, it’s an indictment of the patriarchy.

Here, Bella Baxter replaces the classic feared creature of the original story, and the violence she commits, the reason the world tries to destroy her, is because she dares to live her life openly and unapologetically as her own. Her intellectual and sexual awakening is a story of empowerment. It's a smirking, but very clear commentary of the way society attempts to limit and control women. Poor Things is the heroic story of a woman who forges her own path, a tale of triumph against a world that constantly tells you what to do, what’s expected of you, and what you’re allowed to want.

Bold, fascinating, lovely, and wonderful, driven both by a unique voice and some amazing performances, Poor Things has been nominated for Best Picture, Actress, Supporting Actor, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Score, Cinematography, Costume Design, Editing, Production Design, and Makeup and Hairstyling, and it definitely deserves all of them.

It is one of the best films of the year.

It’s fair to say that there are some saggy bits in the film, parts where things maybe slow down a bit too much, but that didn’t bother me. Now, whether you like this film or not, or any film really, or any piece of art, it’s up to you, right? It’s totally subjective. But I’ve seen some people deride this film, and call it self-indulgent, or claim that its look and feel and attitude are nothing but a gimmick, or nothing but a dark twist on the more familiar style of Wes Anderson. And I find that need to classify styles, to put them in a labeled box immediately, that knee-jerk fear of any different approaches to storytelling, that arms-crossed refusal to listen past your own discomfort, to be the most boring response possible. “Is it ‘self-indulgent,’ you philistine? Is it a ‘gimmick,’ you uncouth vulgarian? Is it ‘weird?’ Perhaps you should just be silent then, go back to TGIFriday’s and enjoy your Awesome Blossom of Mediocrity.” Because, seriously, if you’re plain old unwilling to engage with a piece of art on its own terms, to be open to experiencing what it has to offer, then why the fuck are you even here?

Go watch Fast X. Go watch Mission Impossible. Go watch Rebel Moon.

For the rest of us, Poor Things is the story of a young woman on an odyssey of self-exploration, and it’s a fantastic thing to watch. Fantastic.

I loved it.