This movie year we’ve seen a number of entries, some quite wonderful, in various genres from the Superhero Movie (“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” “The Flash,” “The Marvels”) to the Corporate Origins Tale (“Air,” “BlackBerry,” “Tetris,” “Flamin’ Hot”) to the Existential Hit Man Fable (“Killer,” “Fast Charlie,” “John Wick: Chapter 4”) — but there’s always room for wholly original and unique stories, as evidenced by the one-two summer punch of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.”
In that latter category, we can now add Yorgos Lanthimos’ beautifully garish, wonderfully twisted, unabashedly raunchy and at times grotesquely striking “Poor Things,” and while it might sound clichéd to say you’ve never seen anything like it, trust me: You’ve never seen anything like it.
Based on the 1992 novel “Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer,” this is a fractured fairy tale version of Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” with a bit of “Candide” and “Through the Looking-Glass” and the films of Terry Gilliam thrown in. Director Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara (Lanthimos’ screenwriter on “The Favourite”) and the behind-the-scenes wizards have teamed up to create a fantastical, demented, sometimes wondrous world filled with some of the most stunning sets, costumes and scenery of any film this year.
With Emma Stone delivering the very definition of an all-in performance and a brilliant supporting cast led by Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo, this is an aggressively weird (sometimes too much so) black comedy and social satire — the kind of movie that will surely make many a “Best of the Year” list but might also have some theatergoers heading for the exits by the halfway point.
With cinematographer Robbie Ryan delivering visuals that veer from black-and-white to screen-popping colors with the occasional use of a fish-eye lens, “Poor Things” is set in a steampunk, exaggerated Victorian-era England, After a prologue in which a woman in a blazing blue dress apparently commits suicide by jumping off the Tower Bridge in London, we’re introduced to Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a mad scientist whose face is terribly scarred and jagged, due to his insane father’s experiments on him when Godwin was a child.
Godwin is a professor and doctor who lectures at university and conducts bizarre experiments on animals and corpses in his home laboratory. His most extraordinary creation, so to speak, is one Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), who has a child’s brain inside a young woman’s body, and we’ll go into no further detail of the circumstances that led to that other than to say: What the actual F.
Initially, Bella has the intelligence and emotions of a toddler; she careens around the cavernous house with a strange gait, she can’t control her bladder, she spits out food and is prone to outbursts. There’s an almost marionette-like quality to Bella, with Godwin (she calls him “God”) pulling the strings.
However, as Bella begins to mature at a rapid rate, learning new words every day, experiencing a voracious sexual awakening (the things she does with an apple!) and becoming ever more curious, Godwin is convinced he needs to bring in an assistant to monitor Bella, and he chooses his promising student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), who quickly falls in love with her. Godwin agrees to a marriage between Max and Bella, but only under certain conditions, so he enlists the services of the rapscallion attorney and hedonist Duncan Wedderburn (a fantastically over-the-top Mark Ruffalo) to handle the pre-nuptial agreement.
Big mistake, Godwin. Huge.
Duncan promises Bella the adventure of a lifetime, which will include seemingly endless bouts of “furious jumping,” as Bella describes sex, which she truly loves and wonders why people don’t do it ALL THE TIME. (The nudity in “Poor Things” is constant and fast and, well, furious.) Journeys to Lisbon, Alexandria and Paris are rendered in stunningly surrealistic fashion and highlighted by set pieces including a loony dance number between Duncan and Bella and some hijinks aboard a uniquely designed cruise ship where Bella befriends an older woman of blunt elegance (Hanna Schygulla) and her younger friend and traveling companion (Jerrod Carmichael), who encourage Bella to become more independent but also cautions her about the ways of the world. The smarter and more enlightened Bella becomes (with her hair growing at an alarming rate, just because), the less she sees in the sputtering, weak-willed Duncan, who has fallen madly in love with Bella just as she’s ready to send him to the trash heap.
Bella’s adventures take her to Paris, where she becomes a sex worker, until some news about Godwin leads her back home. There’s much more to come, including the appearance of a figure from Bella’s past who is a terrible person and meets a fate that perhaps not even a terrible person deserves.
The final moments of “Poor Things” are bizarre, even for a film that prides itself on being outrageous and borderline nutso, but by then we’ve come to expect and appreciate the creativity of the madness.
