Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) is a medical student of Dr. Goodwin “God” Baxter (Willem Dafoe), selected by the doctor for a special assignment: looking after his daughter, Bella (Emma Stone).  The young woman had suffered an accident and is in the process of rebuilding her mental and physical abilities.  Max and Bella grow very close over their time together, but when Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a lawyer, comes to draft up a wedding contract between the two parties, he too is taken by Bella.  The two run away together, and no longer under the watchful eye of her father and Max, Bella begins to discover a whole new world of pleasure and desire that had been kept from her. 

Poor Things is the latest from Yorgos Lanthimos who has never shied from the absurd aspects of human nature and used that as the entry point into his exploratory stories.  Here, he works from a Tony McNamara script adapting the Alasdair Gray novel for Searchlight Pictures. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival where it was awarded the Golden Lion, the film continued to gain accolades among critics after its stateside bow at Telluride.  The 141-minute film is a dizzying kaleidoscope featuring a dedicated central performance from Stone as she tumbles and topples through Shona Heath and James Price’s luscious designs to the music box tones of Jerskin Fendrix’s playful score. 

While Dafoe gets to chew the scenery as the mad scientist Godwin – though there is some irony as due to his own father’s experiments on him, he needs a massive apparatus to digest any of his meals – and while he is the one who jolts the story into motion, Poor Things is Bella’s twisted coming of age tale.  Stone must navigate an incredible arc across the runtime as her character initially is very physically disjointed while she relearns how to walk and her vocabulary is very limited so she relies on her own unique lexicon to communicate what words she does know.  As the film continues, she becomes more fluid in her motion and more nuanced in her speech, and it is a huge testament to Stone’s skill to be able to make sense of such a detailed character while shooting out of sequence so that it all makes sense when Yorgos Mavropsaridis begins to assemble the film in the editing suite.  Bella is saddled with some really blunt dialogue, but because of the strange style it adds some flair to the otherwise lengthy exposition – either thematic or plot-driven – and given some of the actions that she is asked to perform in front of the lens, the role also displays the incredible level of creative trust which Stone has in Lanthimos after their work together in the similarly depraved period piece, The Favorite (2018), in which she contributed to one of the film’s ten Academy Award Nominations. 

Unfortunately, the script is much looser than the royal romance and Lanthimos seems to be trying to say a lot but never quite makes a real statement across the almost two and a half hours.  There is a lot going on, each chapter has its own theme and thesis for Bella to encounter, dissect, and reshape into her own argument, but nothing that happens really seems to lead to anything as groundbreaking as the setups lead audiences to believe.  Most clearly it is a story about empowerment and breaking free from the social norms, and while the message and intent are all good, it is such a surface-level examination of theme that it gets swallowed up by the production design and easily written off as slight.  Wrapped in blunt satire, the film tries to keep that same level of absurdity to point at the absurdity of antiquated gender roles, and on paper it works really well.  Heath and Price are able to weaponize the Victorian era styles and systems so that Bella has ample opportunity to bristle up against society without having to do too much heavy lifting on the page, but McNamara’s script is content to call out these unsavory aspects about how women are viewed in society and content to leave it at that.  Comparison is the thief of joy, but the lack of real investigation or confrontation gives the film away as a story about female empowerment filtered through a man’s point of view, and when Kelly Fremon Craig’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (2023) offers a stronger account of growing up, it leaves McNamara little place to hide behind his own threadbare thesis.  

While the two films could not look more different – one a grounded and nostalgic tale and the other an erotic fantasy – the two both share a similar arc of a young girl becoming a woman.  Ever the provocateur, Lanthimos really pushes the envelope here when it is revealed that Bella did not suffer an injury, rather, she committed suicide.  Godwin fishes her corpse from the river, and discovering that she was pregnant, he does the only logical thing: deliver the baby, remove its brain, and transplant it into Bella’s head.  When the film is viewed from a step back, and that Bella’s entire sexual awakening and marriage proposal starts while she still has the mental facilities of a small child, Poor Things becomes an exceptionally gross and unsavory story.  While she does grow by the time the film ends, the damage is done and audiences may have already tuned out after scene after scene of “furious jumping” and Bella’s innocent suggestions that totally redefined the power balance in a London brothel where she finds herself employed in the penultimate chapter.  Everything stems from her simple questions of “why not?”  Why can she not sit at home and pleasure herself all day?  Why can she not read a book?  Why can she not give away money to the poor?  Why can she not simply request the man who she will be engaging with instead of the other way around?  These are all valid points, but McNamara does not engage in any of these topics other than to bring them up, mildly provoke the audience, and quickly scurry the story along to the next point of interest.  For the modern audience, we already know that women have agency and to have every aspect of their lives dictated and controlled by husbands and fathers is wrong, so there is not really anything left to think or mull over by the time the film ends because we enter into this thesis already in agreement and McNamara offers us no deeper meaning, understanding, or history of the movement.  To call Poor Things the Forrest Gump (1994) of women’s activism is a bit of a stretch, but the core elements are all there and the scope of that comparison is seemingly what the film was aiming to be, but somewhere along the way, it got lost in its own design.  

Poor Things has a lot of merit behind it, mostly in the performances as previously highlighted with Stone and Dafoe, but Ruffalo also excels as a comic force in the film.  The film is a synthesization of many of Lanthimos’ previously expressed interests, but he gets carried away in the style of it all.  Thankfully, the style also has lots to be enjoyed from the dog-duck that waddles across the property to the elegant Dr. Seuses-inspired sets with bright, rich colors and questionable structural integrity.  The problem arises that the film feels very hollow, especially when Lanthimos’ previous work is taken into account.  It just is not deep enough in its theories and themes to support the runtime.  As Lanthimos continues to grow his concepts in line with his expanding budgets, he will need to find, write, or otherwise curate scripts that give him deep and realized characters to put into his distorted funhouse reflections of life lest one of the most striking and unique voices of the modern landscape will quickly turn stale.