Practice saying this with me: “Two-time Academy Award winner, Emma Stone.” That’s how good the La La Land star is in her newest feature, Poor Things – one of Stone’s best movies, and the next collaboration with The Favourite director Yorgos Lanthimos. Having made the fall film festival circuit, Poor Things is starting to screen for audiences, riding on a wave of critical support for Lanthimos’s unique vision. And as was pointed out in CinemaBlend’s official Poor Things review, the movie soars on the performance of Stone as Bella Baxter, a woman potentially “created” in a lab by the inquisitive Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) and then unleashed on the world.
There are parallels in Bella’s story to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Only, Poor Things asks, ‘What if Frankenstein’s monster discovered her own sexuality, and became obsessed with what she properly labels “happy when she want!”’ The journey that follows is very sex-positive, and very much in line with the pitch-black comedy that Lanthimos brought to his earlier films, both with Emma Stone (The Favourite) and without her (The Lobster, Dogtooth).
