The Brooklyn Rail

Since his debut, Yorgos Lanthimos has held intimacy up at a studied, stilted distance, like a child pulling the legs off frogs one by one to see how they will jump. In Poor Things (2023), his latest feature, Lanthimos’s beautiful Frankenstein’s monster’s monster (Emma Stone) treats her Victorian steampunk world like a playground, but when she sees a frog delicately cupped in a man’s hands, with a beatific smile, she promptly squishes it to death. Lanthimos’s typical brutal curiosity for his creations, each a world of stylized sexual misanthropy and giddy, affected alienation, loses its bite, replaced instead with what Bella Baxter terms “sugar and violence”––this time, heavy on the sugar.

Where his films typically render amoral characters and their worldviews with the curiosity of a mad scientist, Poor Things presents its inhabitants like the simple, though eminently lovable, figures in a postmodern fairytale, far closer to Walt Disney than Lanthimos’s usual Brothers Grimm. This isn’t to say the film’s surprisingly optimistic sendup of Victorian-era morality and misogyny doesn’t delight, but, like the pastéis de nata Bella eats by the dozen during a trip to Lisbon, too much sweetness may make some viewers queasy.

Based on a novel by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, Poor Things blends Mary Shelley’s classic tale of monstrous paternity and lost innocence with the context of Shelley’s own highly political life and libertine milieu. Frankenstein was written in 1816 by a then-nineteen-year-old Mary, the daughter of two radicals, the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the anarchist–utilitarian philosopher William Godwin. Her own marriage, to the “subversive” polyamorous Romantic poet Percy Shelley, was only made possible by his first wife’s suicide, committed by drowning, some say while she was pregnant with their second child.

In the film, Shelley’s mothers and daughters and monsters and fathers come together when a utilitarian mad scientist named Godwin or “God” (Willem Dafoe), whose patchwork face and missing organs are testaments to his childhood as his own father’s lab rat, reanimates the corpse of a heavily pregnant suicide, swapping her brain for that of her soon-to-be-born child. Godwin, with the help of his soft spoken assistant, Max (Ramy Youssef), raises this New Woman, whom he names Bella, as his daughter, (and thus in the family tradition, as an experiment) to “push the boundaries of what is known.” Or maybe just to see what happens. Bella’s rapid (re-)coming of age takes Shelley’s tale of The Modern Prometheus and tells it from a perspective closer to that of its author, an enterprising, brilliant, wealthy young Victorian woman with a loving, shockingly supportive found family. In turn, the film, with its deeply affectionate, largely uncritical treatment of these oddball “questing spirits,” itself feels like the product of a misanthrope who has, following years of confrontational outsider filmmaking, found his people. This transformation shows Lanthimos losing some of his hard edges––and by extension some of the ambiguity and distance that makes films like Dogtooth or The Killing of a Sacred Deer so unique––though none of his talent in the process.

In terms of its filmmaking, Poor Things is assured in its own virtuosity, and for good reason. Its lavish Neo-Victorian mise-en-scène, with production design by Shona Heath and James Price, complemented by a deliciously discordant score by Jerskin Fendrix and fabulous, kaleidoscopic cinematography by Robbie Ryan, are a perfect jungle gym for Bella to play in. Emma Stone delivers what may be her career-best performance yet, animating and reanimating Bella again and again throughout her development from beautiful plaything gone rogue to a self-assured young woman ready to devour the world. In doing so, Bella flips Wollstonecraft’s disgusted maxim that Victorian women were “created to be the toy of man, his rattle, and it must jingle in his ears, whenever, dismissing reason, he chooses to be amused” on its head. Dafoe, too, delivers a nuanced performance as God, the father (both metaphorically and literally, given his nickname). The cavalcade of characters (mostly men, mostly fops and rakes) Bella meets are, in general, hilarious. For example, Mark Ruffalo’s Duncan Wedderburn, Bella’s devil-may-care scoundrel of a paramour-cum-histrionic-proto-incel-nemesis, is painted with just the right combination of florid theatricality and snark. The film’s novelistic structure is loose to a fault, rambling like its protagonist through its own world, but its humor never flags. Bella careens from city to city, maturing from a rambunctious child playing piano with her feet in God’s domestic sphere to a sexually ravenous teenaged libertine wilding through the streets of Lisbon. From that point, she develops into a politically idealistic (and still sexually ravenous) young woman in Paris, and that’s hardly the end of her transformations. Her curiosity is never satisfied.

Like its style, the film wears its politics on its embroidered satin sleeve, though not to the daring end for which it seems to aim. Bella’s journey into adulthood is both a fantasy of sexual liberation to the tune of a Jeanette Winterson novel and a shallow survey course in nineteenth century feminism and politics. It does better on the first score. Bella’s realization that “the thing between her ears” has the potential to be just as interesting as “the thing between her legs” comes on a ship, when two other passengers introduce her to Spinoza’s Ethics and the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Soon, she's sobbing about the hideous conditions of the poor and handing over ludicrous sums of money to rascally crewmen who squirrel it away for themselves. Like the pompous politics of Woody Harrelson’s captain in Triangle of Sadness last year, these beats during Bella’s emotionally tempestuous adolescence are clearly meant (at least in part) to poke fun at this Poor little rich girl; nevertheless the film’s overwhelming earnestness takes some of the fun out of scenarios, like Bella’s turn to Parisian prostitution in order to “seize her own means of production.” Indeed, the film’s dalliances with on-the-nose, internet-y socialism are never quite reconciled with Bella’s vast wealth and seeming political apathy at the film’s conclusion, lightly implied polyamory or no. Similarly, Bella’s brief, explicitly queer encounter with a fellow prostitute, Toinette (Suzy Bemba), feels disappointingly perfunctory, a nod to the sexual underground of an era best known for virulent conformism rather than an exploration of Bella’s genuinely unfettered sense of right and wrong that free her from the conventions of her time.

Nevertheless, Bella’s “empirical” approach to life’s experiments—sexual, emotional, and otherwise—is a continuous delight, even at its most direct. Lanthimos’s blunt approach to the shock gag still packs a punch, even in this softer package. If she doesn’t enjoy the taste of something, Bella spits it out. She has near-constant sex because she likes it. She has sex for money because it’s practical. She doesn't understand monogamy because it isn’t logical to her. She feels no shame. Men who seek to control Bella by playing on a societally ingrained “fragile” femininity she does not possess find themselves trembling at her feet, masculine ego shattered. Sexual hysteria is reflected back onto its inventors. In Poor Things, as Mary Wollstonecraft wished for her Victorian sisters, Bella “boldly learns to know good by practising evil without [God’s] permission.” But evil is relative, and Bella finds it all very interesting.