Review: Emma Stone Is The Lightning That Animates 'Poor Things'

By Jason Adams | Film | October 5, 2023 |

By Jason Adams | Film | October 5, 2023 |

Is there anyone working harder to dispel the notion that there are no new ways to tell stories than Yorgos Lanthimos? Since breaking onto the international stage fourteen years ago with his deliciously meanspirited incest masterpiece Dogtooth (as one does), he’s shown us a troupe of maladjusted empathy actors (Alps), a seaside hotel where failed singles get turned into Shetland ponies (The Lobster), Barry Keoghan eating spaghetti (The Killing of a Sacred Deer), and, in his most mainstream feat to date, a royal lesbian love triangle buried under powdered wigs and oozing gout (The Favourite).

And now here five years and one pandemic later, our dear Yorgos has returned to us weirder and wilder than ever with the triumphantly deranged Poor Things, which in its triumphantly deranged way feels like the film he’s been building to all this time. A fairy tale by the way of Grimm, not Disney—although one costume is very clearly nodding towards Snow White, if Snow White had gone mad with syphilis - this is the biggest and boldest vision from Lanthimos to date. A Jeunet-ian psycho-scape of Victorian puffery twisted inside out, it’s as if the director has scooped out the innards of Mary Shelley and sewed her corpse shut with Terry Gilliam trapped inside.

Emma Stone, giving the performance of her career to date, plays Bella, the Lady Frankenstein’s Monster to the film’s Dr. Frankenstein, here named Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), or “God” for short. God’s patchwork face and tendency to burp massive indigestion bubbles betray his own misshapen surgical past—namely that he was his famous scientist father’s most favorite lab rat. And that’s a tragic fact that manages to keep his character on the close side of sympathetic, even as he plays maniacal Moreau-esque games with every life-form within arm’s length. (My kingdom for a line of plush toys that recreate his bizarre menagerie.)

When we first meet Bella, she’s infant-brained—taking her first steps, learning her first words, giddily smashing her first full service of chinaware. God takes on a starry-eyed new assistant named Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) to chart Bella’s growth, and much humor is derived, across the entire length of the film, from the eccentric mish-mash of gibberish that Bella shapes language into. This specific aspect reminded me specifically of two other films—first, of the opening credits to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, where Scarlett Johansson’s alien-being is formed from a puddle of whiteness and we hear her turn abstract noises into something approaching human speech.

And second and more obviously it reminded me of Lanthimos’ Dogtooth, which was a film deeply invested in the mutation of language past its absurdist breaking point—where “shotgun” means “bird” and where cats were humanity’s most fearsome enemy. There the rearranging of meaning was an act of fascistic violence—a father trapping his children beneath his thumb. Here in Poor Things, however, it’s a more joyous act—God seems delighted by Bella’s inventiveness and lets her run wild with weird discovery.

Up to a point, of course—as God tells McCandles, the parameters of “the experiment” must be observed, not influenced by outside factors. All of which makes Bella as much of a captive inside her Victorian mansion as were the adult children in Dogtooth.

So then this too becomes a fable of self-actualization. A tangled-up coming-of-age tale where Bella climbs up to the rooftop and stares out across the late-19th-century London skyline with stars in her eyes and longing in her confused heart; you half expect her to start spinning and singing about how there must be more than this provincial life. (And one’s mind slightly boggles imagining what the musical version of this would look and especially sound like—we do get another unhinged Favourite-esque dance sequence, at least!)

Lanthimos’ preoccupation with “new language” hardly ends with a maid screaming that Bella grabbed her by the “hairy business” though. The director enlists all of his collaborators, from his production-designers to his costumers to every actor he puts on screen, to do things just a mite or a mile’s span differently, and it remains an invigorating reaping of reward. As Bella escapes into the outside world—with all the Oz-esque technicolor wizardry such journeys must entail, all bleeding out into every hallucinogenic corner of this whole-cloth invented and fabulous world—the skies swirl purple and black, smokes yellow, underpants silk and fabrics incongruously plastic and structurally strange.

It’s not just that there are new things to look at—it’s that there are so many psychedelic details bubbling and boiling on every surface that our eyes, like Bella’s, simply heave with awe. Yes, this is what the world would seem like, we think, to a fresh gal like Bella—fish-eyed and wondrous. A moveable feast of imagination. The discovery of texture and sensation, of gesture and genital pleasure, are all given new vigor beneath Lanthimos & Co’s guiding hands.

And yes, as it inevitably must, sex—or as Bella terms it, “furious jumping”—becomes very important very quickly to Bella’s journey. The necessary exploration of these impulses is what leads her out the door—specifically, the entirely understandable impulse to “furious jump” right onto Mark Ruffalo, over and over and over again. Ruffalo, a ribald triumph as the libertine lawyer Duncan Wedderburn, arrives one day in God’s mansion to draw up the proposed marriage contract between Bella and McCandles, which God thinks will satiate Bella’s swelling sexual desires. But fancying himself a modern man, Wedderburn doesn’t think a woman like Bella should be imprisoned by marriage—she should instead be imprisoned in his bed, bouncing a lot as she does it.

And so the two abscond, with God’s begrudging permission, so she can see and smell and fuck something of the world, and not become all twisted up with hate at her circumstances like she warns God will happen if he doesn’t allow it. From there where their adventures, erotic and otherwise, take them I daren’t spoil, but do feel safe in the knowledge that Lanthimos and his team of blessed lunatics have crafted landscape after landscape of cracked wonder the likes of which you have never seen before. Indeed bird is shotgun and shotgun is bird, and poisonous vistas spill like bowels so beautiful you’re begging to night-swim them.

On her journey Bella will meet and learn life lessons from a parade of great big characters played by icons and iconoclasts—a wise older woman with a big hat on a steamboat played by Fassbinder legend Hanna Shygulla; a dandy cynic in striped suits played Jerrod Carmichael; a practical madam covered in sailor tattoos played by Kathryn Hunter (a stage actress mainly who you should definitely recognize from two years ago when she gave an award-worthy performance as the three witches in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth).

Politics and philosophy and pornography will commingle and burst out the other side like champagne and vomit—the very mixture of life itself. And Emma Stone makes a feast of it—this movie wouldn’t just not work without her, it wouldn’t exist, and so we’re blessed on both fronts. She builds Bella from the ground up, undoes her, and undoes her again and again, like a mad scientist digging around in one’s own intestines and trying to place all of the organs the right way for maximum personhood. It’s a lightning storm of performance, seaming together every outlandish twist of abundance into one great fleshy self. A true wonder of the world—whatever world you want it to be, she’s got it.

‘Poor Things’ screened at the 2023 New York Film Festival. It’s scheduled for release in the United States on December 8th, 2023.