Rating: 8.5/10 | Director: Yorgos Lanthimos | Runtime: 141 min | Released: December 2023

Yorgos Lanthimos has made a film that should not work as well as it does. Poor Things is a gothic Victorian comedy about a woman brought back to life with the brain of her own unborn child, who then proceeds to discover the world, and herself, with complete disregard for the social codes meant to contain her. It is anarchic, profane, visually overwhelming, and genuinely funny. It is also, quietly and without apology, a film about what it means to be a person who gets to define themselves on their own terms.

Emma Stone Is Doing Something Extraordinary

Bella Baxter starts the film with the motor skills and speech of a toddler, in the body of a grown woman, in a Victorian mansion run by her creator, Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Stone plays the early stages of Bella’s development with a physicality that is deliberate and strange and frequently hilarious. The walk she invents for Bella in the first act, something between a lurch and a determination, is a performance detail that establishes the character’s relationship with her own body more effectively than any line of dialogue could.

As Bella grows, learns language, discovers sex, travels, reads, and argues with everyone around her about the nature of freedom and will, Stone tracks the development with extraordinary precision. She doesn’t play Bella as a blank slate being written on by the world. She plays her as someone with a genuine self that is discovering its own shape. The difference is everything.

The Visual World

Robbie Ryan shoots the film in fisheye lenses and wild color palettes that shift depending on where Bella is in her development. The world of Godwin’s mansion is desaturated and strange. Lisbon is warm and golden. Paris is lush. The choices are not subtle, but they are consistent with the film’s logic, this is Bella’s perceptual world as much as an objective one.

The production design is extraordinary. Every set looks like a dream version of a Victorian city, slightly wrong in a specific and purposeful way, architecture that doesn’t quite follow its own rules, spaces that don’t connect the way they should. It’s the aesthetic of a novel illustrated by someone who never looked at a photograph of the period and had to invent it.

Mark Ruffalo and the Comedy

Mark Ruffalo plays Duncan Wedderburn, the lawyer who spirits Bella away from London on the promise of adventure, and who becomes progressively unhinged as Bella refuses to behave the way he expected a kept woman to behave. It’s a genuinely funny performance, broad without being cartoonish, ridiculous in a specific and human way. His descent is played purely for comedy, which works because Lanthimos never lets you forget that Bella finds him as funny as we do.

What It’s Actually About

The film’s argument, and it does have one, is that socialization is mostly a system designed to prevent people, especially women, from pursuing their own curiosity, pleasure, and judgment. Bella, having been socialized from scratch by a man who genuinely wants her to figure things out for herself, ends up more free than anyone around her. The ending is aggressively optimistic in a way that some viewers may find too neat. It works for me because the film has earned its utopianism through 140 minutes of refusing to be solemn about any of it.

Poor Things is raucous, committed, and held together by a performance that would be the best of any normal year. It will not be for everyone. For the audience willing to meet it on its own terms, it is one of 2023’s most rewarding cinema experiences.