Review: "Poor Things" is a poignant and profane fairy tale for adults

Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone re-team for another instant classic

The mind inevitably casts about for analogies when trying to describe a film as strange and singular as Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things. It is Frankenstein in its basic concept (the Mary Shelley book specifically, not the Universal monster iteration), but more akin to Pinocchio in execution as the story of a father creating a child who goes out into the world and learns through experience. It demands religious readings – the child character always calls the father ‘God’ – but the Old Testament plot foundation of a child leaving their carefully crafted Eden is tempered by a God with some New Testament chill and understanding, and the film sees sexuality (specifically female sexuality) as empowering, not damnable. The film is a Dickensian Bildungsroman, too, the story of a young person coming into maturity and a sense of ethics, of what is right and wrong with the world.

Yet all these descriptors make this gloriously demented film sound too normal; the film, like its protagonist, resists being categorized so easily. Its sense of humor is, characteristic of Lanthimos’ work, sometimes clever and sometimes childish, almost always profane, the leaps in between being part of the joy. It is grotesque and graphic in places, brazenly sexual (though rarely erotic) throughout, and astonishingly beautiful in every moment. In its cinematography and design, yes – from a first act that conjures the most eerie and evocative black-and-white Victorian London dreamscape since The Elephant Man, to the watercolor steampunk fantasy world it eventually opens into – but also in the film’s enduring, disarming sweetness. Lanthimos has crafted a big-hearted movie about the strangeness of being alive, one that takes the Frankenstein-cum-Pinocchio idea of a person who is fully grown physically but tabula rasa mentally to explore what is ecstatic, hollow, violent, uncanny, and wonderful about life, and ultimately come to the conclusion that our messy, transient existence is, in sum, quite interesting, and therefore quite worthwhile.

I find myself not wanting to give too many specifics about what Poor Things is about, because watching it is such a consistently remarkable act of discovery. Emma Stone, who did the previous best work of her career in Lanthimos’ last film, The Favorite, one-ups herself here as Bella, a dead woman who has been reanimated with the mind of a child by Dr. Baxter (Willem Dafoe, wearing heavy scars that give the Doctor the traditional ‘Frankenstein monster’ visage). Eventually, she becomes curious, and begins exploring – first her own body, then the world. All those story shapes I mentioned above, from the Bible to Pinocchio to the Bildungsroman, are most often applied to male protagonists, but Poor Things is firmly centered in the perspective and lived experience of a woman: specifically, a child in a grown woman’s body, who encounters the sensations of sex, the absurdities of gender distinctions, and the violent insecurities of men as a blank slate. If I could boil down Poor Things to a simple, one-word theme, it would be ‘ownership’ – who is allowed control over whose body, how that control is claimed and reclaimed, and how we are socialized to view love and sex as intwined with dominance and submission (not in the consenting, kinky fun way). If Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a great Feminism 101 primer for young people – or the many, many adults who have never meaningfully encountered and digested those ideas – then Poor Things is a few levels up, both in the complexity of the concepts it explores, and in the density and intricacy of how it communicates cinematically.

Stone is a revelation here. She has such total command of her body, her expressions, her movements, her own iconography and how the film twists and challenges that image; there is a dance sequence in the middle of the film that, if there is any justice in this world, would get similar levels of virality and imitation as Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday dance. I would say Stone is giving a performance worthy of the silent-era masters, except that her command of speech and syntax is just as overwhelming. Tony McNamara’s script, adapted from the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, puts so many creative strings of words into her mouth, constantly framing quotidian things in striking, surprising, and deeply funny ways – this film has to hold the record for ‘most euphemisms for masturbation in a single motion picture’ – and Stone lands every verbal blow with aplomb.

The movie belongs quite firmly to Stone, but Willem Dafoe is similarly vital to creating the film’s strangely warm tone. I doubt you could pull off his character with any other actor, because there is no other performer so capable of playing the grim and grotesque and the lovingly heartfelt all at the same time. Dafoe has been experiencing something of a golden age as of late, with so many filmmakers – from Robert Eggers to Wes Anderson – cueing in on both his inherent eccentricities and his inherent warmth, and Lanthimos is on that same wavelength here.

Robbie Ryan’s cinematography is so intoxicatingly gorgeous that it, much like the film, defies easy description. Its visual signature is the use of extreme wide-angle and fish-eye lenses, bending the world into abstract, distended patterns around the center of vision, but it is also an absolute symphony of vibrant color and texture (and, in its most astonishing black-and-white section, of tone and contrast). It is all very painterly, assisted by copious visual effects and digital compositing that put many infinitely-higher-budgeted Hollywood blockbusters to shame. Lanthimos is careful to never let us stray too far into pure fantasy or wonderment; the atonal, screeching score by Jerskin Fendrix pulls us back a bit, emphasizing the uncanny and the dark within these spaces. It all serves to make the film’s world feel richer, deeper, more dimensional and worthy of exploration.

What blew me away most by the film’s end is what a thoroughly life-affirming vision Poor Things offers. In all its outlandish and profane peculiarities, the ways it confronts and amuses and challenges, it finds a way to cogently, powerfully express just how weird and wonderful life is – how amazing a gift it is to get to learn and grow and discover, to experience new sensations, to let some sensations grow dull and mundane, and to reinvent ourselves over and over again. The film is, like any existential text, partially concerned with death and dying, but it also posits humanity’s capacity to live so many lives within the confines of our fleeting existence. Poor Things is, ultimately, an incredibly humanistic and positive film, its vision of humanity slotting in nicely alongside other films this year grappling with similar ideas, like Asteroid City and The Boy and the Heron. It is a grand, expansive, masterful motion picture, one that will cast a very long shadow for many years to come.

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