“I found nothing but sugar and violence.”
Bella Baxter
Where The Favourite lulled viewers into a false sense of security before indulging in Yorgos Lanthimos’ sly humour, Poor Things is open with its weirdness from the start. Adapted from Alasdair Gray’s novel, Poor Things is at its core a film about a young woman’s discovery of herself and the world, told through a kind of steampunk historic fable with a visual style reminiscent of Terry Gilliam. The opening chapter is steeped in gothic imagery, a scarred Willem Dafoe embodying both Dr Frankenstein and his monster, literally playing God as he shortens his name, Godwin. Lanthimos reunites with Emma Stone as Godwin’s creation, Bella, who begins undeveloped despite her adult body, toddling and prone to tantrums, the puffy shoulders of her costumes creating an unstable, top-heavy silhouette like the strange chimeric animals that fill the lavish house. I opted to see a rare 35mm film screening which faithfully recreated the cinematography choices, like lenses that provided distortion and mismatched sizing to heighten vignetting, replicating the effect of early cameras. Colour arrives as Bella sets off to travel Europe, accentuating the film’s painted backgrounds. Bella’s immaturity grants her the freedom typically commanded by men of the period, freed from societal constraints as she applies logic without understanding. Emma Stone’s performance is fascinating as Bella evolves over the course of the film in both knowledge and capability, whilst the men around her stagnate — it is a rare opportunity for a single actor to take a character from early childhood to realised adulthood. In the abstract many of the intermediate scenes are bizarre and uncomfortable — particularly given the quantity of sex — and Poor Things must have required extreme trust from its actors that Lanthimos would successfully tie this all together. He has always been a director of singular vision but here it seems stripped of pretension, producing something sly yet whimsical, witty yet haunting.
9/10
