This review is part of our coverage of the 2023 New York Film Festival.
The Pitch: Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) is a most unusual creature: The product, as it were, of her doctor-cum-father Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), whom she affectionately refers to as “God,” she is a seemingly grown woman with decidedly childlike attitudes and physicality. She walks on her heels like a doll, moves her limbs without much use of her elbows and knees, and looks around the world with her big doe eyes as if seeing it for the first time. She’s growing up, though — growing up so fast, in fact, that she goes from learning 15 new words a day to discovering (and growing obsessed with) the “pleasant feelings” that come when she touches herself down there.
Her strangeness attracts the attention of Max McCandless (Ramy Youssef), a young research assistant of Godwin’s, who’s been hired to study her progression and growth (which is considerable). He grows enamored of her, so much that he secures her hand in marriage, with the caveat that she never be allowed to leave Godwin’s palatial London estate. But the lawyer drawing up the contract, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) turns out to be a right rakish cad who surmises such a naif ought not be locked in a cage but to run off with him to screw their way around the rapidly-civilizing world.
And so off Bella Baxter goes, on an odyssey across Europe that will awaken her eyes to the sights, sensations, and sins the wider world has to offer.
Frankenspringa: It’s strange to think of Poor Things as Greek Weird Wave auteur Yorgos Lanthimos’ most accessible film; after all, it features everything from rampant scenes of acrobatic sex to dismemberment and disfigurements of all sorts from Godwin’s many experiments. But the director of Dogtooth and The Lobster has been gradually making his way towards something this vivid and vibrant his whole career, inching toward his audience with one absurdist feature after another.
Indeed, Poor Things (adapted from the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray) feels like Lanthimos’ next logical step after his last collaboration with screenwriter Tony McNamara, The Favourite, both twisted comic mirrors of the ridiculousness of moneyed society and the false promises of civilization. Gray loyalists may balk at the adaptation chucking so much of the novel’s decidedly Scottish specificity. But Lanthimos and McNamara choose instead to embrace the fantastical lens by which the novel views a woman’s path through a man’s world — Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by way of Powell and Pressburger.
Indeed, there’s something of Tim Burton in Shona Heath and James Price’s mannered production design, elaborate soundstages with LED-screen backgrounds making London, Lisbon, Paris, and even a massive passenger liner feel like one of Karel Zeman’s clockwork contraptions. Robbie Ryan’s wide-angle lenses return from The Favourite, both to capture all the period detail (with all its pops of Technicolor vividness) and the innate feeling that Bella’s journey from oppressed woman-child to self-actualized master of her fate is being viewed under a microscope — yet another of Father-God’s experiments.