Poor Things premieres in theaters December 8. This review is based on a screening at the 2023 Venice International Film Festival.
Poor Things – from The Favourite director Yorgos Lanthimos – is a fascinating adaptation of the 1992 novel by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, which echoes and builds on Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” through a modern philosophical lens. The book is a patchwork account of events from multiple points of view – it is itself a Frankenstein’s monster – but the movie untangles and simplifies its dueling perspectives. In crafting a linear adaptation, Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara give birth to the year’s most wry and rollicking comedy, filled with fascinating designs, a stellar ensemble, and much more on its mind than your average Frankenstein retread.
It’s a delightfully perverse work. Which is to say: Poor Things revels in its characters’ strange scientific perversions, which unfold in an anachronistic, retro-future Georgian England. The story centers on the resurrected, Frankenstein-esque Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), an adult woman who, for reasons initially withheld, has the capabilities, temperament, vocabulary, and imbalanced waddle of a toddler. However, she peppers her broken English with the complex scientific jargon she picks up from her creator, the scientist and surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a man kind and fearsome in equal measure, who digests his food through amusing, biomechanically-engineered “burp bubbles” and keeps various animal hybrids around the house (like a chicken with a pig’s head, or a dog with a swan’s). In Gray’s novel, Godwin certainly has these hints of the mad scientist Victor Frankenstein, and he’s even implied to be some sort of surgical creation himself, but the film is more overt about his origins. Without explicitly labeling him as such, it makes numerous gestures towards the fact that Godwin – whose face bears numerous grid-like scars – is, in fact, Frankenstein’s monster, making the Poor Things movie a loose sequel to Shelley’s gothic novel.
However, rather than an actual continuation, its pseudo-sequel status is a framework to understand the movie as well as the history behind it, including the history of Shelley herself. But before it delves into literary self-reflection, it spends the first hour of its 140 minutes in darkly satirical territory, allowing Stone the chance to let loose and create a truly gonzo performance that, quite startlingly, matures before our eyes as Bella learns the ways of the world. In a departure from the book, Godwin’s relationship to Bella is strictly paternal, and McNamara also crafts an intriguing supporting character in the form of the gentle Max McCandles (Rami Yousef), Godwin’s diligent student, who’s tasked with observing Bella and recording her progress, during which he develops feelings for her.
The first and most obvious of Poor Things’s perversions arises here. It never establishes how long Bell has been in this regressed state, or how far she’s actually developed when we meet her. So, when romance is introduced to the equation – courtesy of both McCandles, and the comically suave, ragingly jealous attorney Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) – a discomfort begins to linger, surrounding questions of autonomy and consent, and the degree to which Bella is in charge of her own faculties (though there’s little doubt that she loves sex the moment she discovers it; numerous extreme closeups of her quivering lips during orgasm make sure of that). However, these are also questions Lanthimos eventually folds into the film, framed not as a perversion of the story, but of men’s desires within it. In addition to hints about Bella’s past (of which she has no knowledge), her relationships with Godwin, McCandles, and Wedderburn are defined not only by love, but by control – two forces that exist side by side and become inextricably tangled, forcing Bella to reframe her outlook on the world.
What makes Poor Things such a knee-slapper, despite the dourness at its core, is Stone’s off-the-wall performance, at first, as an overgrown baby, and then as a woman with no filter, whose frank and logistical thinking irks not only the men around her but “polite society” at large. While there’s certainly no real-world equivalent to describe Bella – the process by which she was born is pure science fantasy – it’s hard not to find hints of reality within the way Stone plays her, lacing each of her words and observations with a cutting (if naive) frankness.
Her sexual development starts out as curious, childlike experimentation on herself, and eventually blooms into passionate rendezvous with other people (which she calls “furious jumping”). It’s a metaphorical depiction of adolescence, portrayed with an unflinching eye towards each steamy moment of physical ecstasy. It is, in many ways, a twisted, passionately carnal companion piece to Barbie (or Mattel’s blockbuster as seen through a funhouse mirror). Meanwhile, Bella’s intellectual and philosophical development – during which she absorbs the weight of the world’s problems, and learns to channel her anger and helplessness – feel like the emotional hurdles of a young twenty-something still finding her way and forming her rebellious worldview. Unfortunately, this also makes for a much more somber back half that runs a tad long before honing its eventual point about constricting cycles of abuse.
Stone’s off-the-wall performance makes Poor Things a knee-slapper.
While there’s a chronology to Bella’s physical and emotional changes, they intentionally lack an exact timeframe, so their meaning ends up more symbolic than realistic. This helps Poor Things avoid the thornier implications of its premise with regards to Bella’s age, while also representing, in the abstract, a myriad of lifelong transformations and the arbitrary ways in which society’s rules are set, especially for women. These rules are swiftly knocked down the more Bella explores the world and lets loose her impulses, following each and every instinct towards boisterous conversation or uninhibited movement. (If you’re hoping Poor Things has a dance sequence as wildly entertaining as the one in The Favourite, you’re in luck).
The film’s zany energy is matched by Jerskin Fendrix’s idiosyncratic, off-kilter score, which feels as though the creepiest compositions by Mica Levi (Under The Skin) had been outstretched in different keys, or remixed on a Thermin. Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan complement Stone’s eccentricity with wide lenses verging on fisheye, introducing us to scenes as though we were peering in on them through peep holes, and warping spaces and faces alike in caricatured ways. Poor Things is deeply farcical, but there’s an uncanny wonder to it as well. While its initial scenes are in black and white, its transition to color, once Bella explores her surroundings, yields a saturated, Jules Verne-inspired world that feels enormous. It’s as though it were being presented through the eyes of a child each time the camera dances through space. However, the movie’s sense of innocence is quickly lost – not because of its unapologetic sexual energy, but rather, via revelations about Bella’s origins that bring the themes of the novel, as well as Shelley’s original Frankenstein, more sharply into view.
Poor Things and Frankenstein
Frankenstein (whose full title is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus) is widely-known to be about scientific hubris. But what’s often lost in modern analyses is that its horrors are rooted in what Shelley likely perceived as perversions of creation and birth – or possibly, that creation and birth were perversions in and of themselves. She was pregnant twice while writing much of the book, and had previously had a tragic stillbirth, which may have informed her fantasy about a scientist breathing life into a corpse. To add to this, her own mother had also died shortly after childbirth. The last letter she had from her referred to the unborn Shelley as an “animal,” whom she detested, before abandoning her in death – the same way Victor Frankenstein abandons his “monster.” These ideas (and the fact that Shelley’s maiden name was Godwin) crop up in numerous ways in Poor Things, some of which are better left unspoiled, but all of which harken back to Shelley’s novel and the circumstances of its writing. Godwin is also nicknamed “God” for much of the movie, magnifying the dueling hubris and compassion at the character’s core, as someone who both loves and manipulates his strange creations.
Lanthimos, in bringing his signature “Greek Weird Wave” surrealness to such an enormous canvas, gives the Hollywood comedy a shot in the arm, with luxurious decor, lavish sci-fi sets, and absurd dialogue whose careful timing and intonation makes you lean forward in anticipation of each exchange and punchline. The entire cast is delightful, from Ruffalo’s self-effacing take on masculine bravado, to the way Dafoe emotes silently from behind his prosthetic Habsburg jaw, to Stone’s wide-eyed, insatiable curiosity for all forms of pleasure and stimulation. It’s a film that breaks down human impulses to their most basic tenets and rebuilds them in stunningly hilarious fashion, depicting what living without shame might actually look like, and how liberating it feels.
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