Wild, lavish and riotously strange, Poor Things is the most unusual coming-of-age story you’ll see this summer. The director, Yorgos Lanthimos, cements himself as one of cinema’s boldest voices in this irreverent adventure that reunites him with the film’s star and producer, Emma Stone. Following on from The Favourite, their last collaboration, which earned Stone an Academy Award nomination, Lanthimos returns to the period drama fold. But while there are opulent gowns aplenty, Poor Things presents a version of Victorian England that audiences have never seen before.
Psychedelic colours and bizarre architecture abound in Lanthimos’s fairytale world, where a mad scientist, Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), has progressed from experimenting with animal hybrids to human subjects. Replacing the brain of a suicidal gentlewoman with that of her unborn child, he creates Bella Baxter, played by Stone in her most audacious performance yet.
