It may only be the third week of January, but it’s hard to imagine that there will be a funnier, filthier or more extravagantly peculiar film this year than Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest picture, his second feature film collaboration with star Emma Stone. To describe Poor Things, which is adapted by Tony McNamara (The Favourite) from the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, as creatively uninhibited hardly does justice to the wild, wild ride that this explosively inventive picture takes us on. Driven by a courageous and physically committed performance from Stone, the film follows her journey as Bella Baxter, at the start of the picture a barely verbal blank slate, who embarks on an autodidact voyage of discovery to become the ultimate self-made woman.
Like much in Poor Things, the period is impossible to pin down exactly. The story of Bella unfolds in a parallel past, a gothic, steampunk-infused Victoriana, a world that is distorted (literally – Lanthimos’s enthusiastic use of fisheye lenses warps the contents of the frame) by the patriarchal power disparities in society. Without giving away the specifics, the picture is a subversive spin on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with the role of Bella’s creator and guardian taken by unorthodox genius Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Called “God” by Bella, Godwin bears grotesque scars on his face and body resulting from his childhood experience as the subject of his father’s deranged scientific curiosity – an experience that failed to stymie his own rather baroque quest for empirical facts. When Godwin recruits eager student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) to keep a record of Bella’s accelerated progress, her grasp of language expands exponentially.
