You can count on Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek film-maker behind such strange creations as The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Lobster and The Favourite, to deliver on oddities. Poor Things, the auteur’s adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, is indeed fabulously weird. A deranged, deliciously surreal bildungsroman and a steampunk fever dream, it’s at once easy to watch and impossible to fully settle into.
Lanthimos has concocted a hypnotic and singular world for Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), the Frankenstein-esque creation by mad scientist Dr Baxter (Willem Defoe, plus garish prosthetic facial scars) in Victorian-era London. Part monochrome, part oversaturated picture book, Poor Things is a visual treat throughout, like a colored engraving come to life. As in The Favourite, Lanthimos makes ample use of a fish-eye lens, barrels into the base functions of the human body and revels in delectable torsions of dialogue.
But the real reason to watch is Stone, in a career-best performance as an inchoate experiment – child brain in an adult woman’s body – who talks, observes, gallivants and mostly fucks her way across Europe and into consciousness. Bella is a shock to the senses – long, jet-black hair and caterpillar brows; wide, intensely curious eyes; stilted and ungainly gait; puff-sleeved outfits that evoke delicious meringues (costume designer Holly Waddington does not miss in this film). She speaks in grunts, single-word demands and, eventually, a sing-song patois of intuitive, broken grammar. And she boasts a complete lack of social conditioning for the women’s subservience or the suppression of desire.
Bella’s shamelessness, in the literal sense of the word – born straight into adulthood, she has none – is a refreshing sight to behold. She is a fascinating creature of pure instinct – for freedom, for spontaneity, for experiences and, most pressingly, for pleasure, especially lust. Stone is particularly virtuosic in playing Bella’s growth through the voracious search for sexual satisfaction, first from masturbation, which catapults her language capacity from pidgin speak to intelligible sentences and the ability to state what she wants. Which is not a marriage to Dr Baxter’s hapless assistant Max McCandless (Ramy Youssef, in what should be a breakout role) but a globetrotting affair with the obviously seedy womanizer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, laying the camp on thick).
Yet she out-hornys even Wedderburn, her glorious dissatisfaction with his limited ability to understand her desires yet another springboard to the realizations of adulthood: friendship (thanks to supporting players Jerrod Carmichael and Suzy Bemba), injustice, inequality, self-reliance. And additionally, in one of the film’s most arch and subversive sections, a career as a sex worker in a Parisian brothel.
To watch Bella develop into a fully realized person, in this fully realized vision of discordant elements, gothic influences and biting humor, is nothing short of a delight. Working with a top-notch team of creatives across the board, Poor Things feels like an affirmation of artistic vision and anti-commercial weirdness. And a bravura turn for Stone, whose career choices are only getting more interesting and bold. (She’s just signed on for Ari Aster’s next film, and is outstanding in the similarly strange, if much more uncomfortable, Showtime series The Curse). Stone’s Bella is bizarre, beguiling and impossible not to root for, and one of the year’s must-see performances.
• This article was amended on 21 December 2023. The titular deer in the Yorgos Lanthimos film was “sacred”, not “scared” as an earlier version said.
