NYFF Review: Poor Things

Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’ surreal, hyper-sexual follow-up to The Favourite, may start with a death, but it’s soon after filled with life from every department of the crew. Based on the 1992 novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray, the film boasts unabashed creativity in every corner. The lush production design transports us to a fantastical version of turn-of-the-century Europe that, with its blend of old and new techniques, harkens back to the German Expressionism of the silent era as much as it does mid-2000s Tim Burton. Robbie Ryan’s always-involving cinematography imbues every composition and movement with rich, colorful detail. The costumes vibrantly point to the sexual themes to be explored while staying true to the period’s genres of fashion.

And then there’s Emma Stone. As Bella, the reanimated corpse of a suicidal woman, only with her brain surgically removed and replaced with that of her unborn child, Stone carries us from the unassuming, sometimes violent, innocence of childhood through to a sexual and personal independence inherently unnatural to the human experience as we know it. She is the force behind which all of the crew’s technical prowess is built upon. It’s an insane swing of a performance that would make or break the film, and Stone nails it, committing fully and earnestly to Lanthimos’ bit.

There’s much dissection in Poor Things, figuratively and literally. Bella’s mad scientist father, Godwin, whom she calls God (Willem Dafoe under prosthetics that make his character a monster of his time), is much more publicly a surgeon. When he’s not gene splicing at home (their backyard is peppered with half-fowl-half-canine curiosities), he’s performing surgeries in front of students—detractors and admirers alike. Among the latter is Max (Ramy Youssef), who Godwin then enlists as his assistant in observing Bella as her infant mind catches up with her adult body.

When Max meets her, she’s throwing whatever words she knows together to make sentences and just generally wreaking havoc as a toddler might. Things change, however, when she discovers that touching her vagina and putting certain objects in her vagina feels good. Soon, the good-natured, similarly innocent Max believes himself to be in love with Bella’s curious and insatiably horny spirit, and thus proposes marriage.

Not enough can be said about Stone here. Her incredibly physical performance coupled with pitch-perfect comedic timing and, when Tony McNamara’s brilliant script calls for it, sincerity make it an easy career-best for the starlet. Dafoe and Youssef are strong complements, but her only true match in the film is Mark Ruffalo (better here than he’s been in about a decade) as Duncan, a controlling would-be suitor who is simply not suited at all for Bella’s seemingly hedonistic outlook on life.

Duncan whisks Bella away from Godwin’s London apartment and introduces her to the world. Naturally, she starts to question things. Not just why she can’t pleasure herself in public all the time, which she tries to at first, but why there’s so much suffering in the world, why men are given certain privileges over women, and why no one responds to their emotions in the truthful manner she does.

The episodic nature of the script lets the film’s many ruminations get explored in full, all while retaining Lanthimos’ technical prowess as Bella grows more adult over the course of her journey. But don’t mistake Poor Things as a quest for sexual realization. There is a complex-enough study of the human condition here, just one that’s refreshingly unafraid of explicitly including sex within that. In Hollywood’s most prudish era in several decades, this film will certainly have less sexually secure audience members clutching their pearls.

Still, with the runtime at two hours and twenty minutes, the film succeeds in making all the points it needs to make and mostly wraps up its character arcs before it’s ready to end. The final episode within the story is more of a reinforcement than a necessity, slightly bogging down a film that was striving for perfection. And perfection it achieves, almost to a fault. As Poor Things begins to slightly overstay its welcome, its various crafts start to feel like they’re overachieving, there less to serve the story and more to do something amazing, which they do.

Unsurprisingly, it’s Stone who holds it all together, ensuring that Bella remains engaging and revelatory as ever even as the film non-lethally miscalculates its third act. These mishaps that suddenly surround her are indeed minor, hardly worsening the experience beforehand and just tacking a little too much onto it. Poor Things is as wild a ride as one can have at the cinemas, one that employs a perfectly imperfect soul to work her way through the cracks of a deranged world. As she finds a way through, one may just stumble upon their own liberation, minor or major as it may be.