Poor Things (2023)

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Screenplay: Tony McNamara

Based on the novel by Alasdair Gray

Cast: Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, Mark Ruffalo as Duncan Wedderburn, Willem Dafoe as Dr. Godwin "God" Baxter, Ramy Youssef as Max McCandles, Christopher Abbott as Alfie Blessington, Kathryn Hunter as Madame Swiney, Jerrod Carmichael as Harry Astley, Hanna Schygulla as Martha von Kurtzroc, Margaret Qualley as Felicity, Vicki Pepperdine as Mrs. Prim

An Abstract Candidate

 

There was something perversely delightful in seeing Poor Things in a multiplex in the afternoon, rather than at night at a specialist cinema. Despite having been a big prestige production, with a Best Picture nomination at the 96th Academy Awards, we are still dealing with a horror/dark comedy with very adult content and subject matter, sexually explicitly and proudly weird. Based on the work by Alasdair Gray, an acclaimed Scottish author and artist, and involving Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, behind transgressive and idiosyncratic productions in his homeland like Dogtooth (2009), it makes me proud that a director I always admired in Lanthimos managed to find a way to enter the British film production industry, with this a British-US-Irish co-production, and not yet compromise his interest in the idiosyncrasies and weirdness of human behaviour.

What we get is a retelling of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein if taking the next logical step in how, once Victor Frankenstein created his being, the being becomes Dr. Godwin Baxter as played by Willem Dafoe, a begrudgingly accepted member of Victorian society and a teacher of human anatomy and surgery in London. Central to the film, as a huge contributor as a co-producer and the lead, is Emma Stone as the logical extension of the Bride of Frankenstein, or in this case the Daughter of Frankenstein in Bella. It is a slight spoiler, but she is a woman who originally committed suicide, throwing herself off London Bridge, only for Baxter to resurrect her with the mind of her unborn child in her womb placing the mother's mind, bringing to life a figure who starts as a grown woman with the mind of the child until she begins to mature psychologically. One of Baxter's students Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) is hired to record her progress, falling for her but with Bella herself always the central character, as her growing self awareness leads her to want to leave the house she has lived in all her life.

It is fascinating to see Lanthimos break through over the years, and here he gets to have the most visually ambitious of his work, an alternative Victorian era world where Bella is our centre, beginning to grasp the world around her slowly in a confined and artificial world under a father she literally calls God. Her journey, played as absurdist and deliberately provocative, is learning back to Dogtooth in the prologue, under her loving father's thumb until he relents to let her have a worldwide affair with a chad named Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). Dogtooth was about a patriarchal figure forcing a confined world on his adult children with their own logic, but here there is the inverse to that film where God relents and lets her, after her discovery of adolescence and her sexuality at the dining table, go off with this womaniser aware of the necessary to let her grow. To the growing frustrations of Duncan, Mark Ruffalo eventually becoming one of the funniest figures in the film for how increasingly exasperated he becomes, Bella's journey becomes existential as she grows and learns of the world in her own way.

The obvious themes, set in the Victorian era, is definitely with "civilised" society as reflected in all the men in Bella's life, how she is meant to be to them in terms of acceptable behaviour and manners, but it does avoid locking this theme to the past, thus neutering the thought experiments of this theme, entirely because this is also set in its own exaggerated world. This forces one to experience Bella's journey personally without necessarily the danger of a realistic historical depiction of the past possible to use as a distancing tool to how this still connects to the current world. It becomes more hypothetical, with its incredibly luscious set designs and fictional worlds, Lisbon turned into a fantasy land with cable cars in the air, but still dealing with the problems which Bella starts to pick up from around herself, all whilst growing awareness from her impulsive interest in the outer world to awareness of others and empathy. I have heard of readings of her as well in terms of the autistic spectrum which, as someone with autism myself, should have been obvious but does consider how much nuisance needs to be considered, from a female viewer with autism, to give a proper reading on this. Certainly, with Bella, though she is initially set up as the child-woman who gains weight to her life as she matures, I do see something I have come to develop as I become older as an autistic person, seeing normalised behaviours meant to be rational as more increasingly subjective and even questionable in their acceptable in behaviour ticks. This is reflect especially here with the taboos Bella casually cuts down as pointless as she learns basic pleasures, learns about her sexuality and her liberation, and all with eventual self awareness. Even if her own perspective separate from others, which is bolstered by the profane sense of humour, hers is a progress towards to better.

It is a great performance by Emma Stone. Committed certainly and willing to work with a sense of complete trust and skill to pull it off, as was the case for the likes of Angeliki Papoulia in his earlier made films, it is not for the obvious aspects like the numerous scenes of nudity which makes this a difficult role, but the initial version of her as a child-woman which she documented was insanely challenging to accomplish without some emotional strain¹. With the help of the script by Tony McNamara, hers like everyone's dialogue is full of idiosyncratic language alongside her own idiosyncratic movements, really needed together to make Bella succeed as a character. Wordplay to her distinct turns of phrase filter through the many subjects she has to deal with, such as her befuddlement of not behaving as she is supposed to be to men, or the wrongs of sex work as a credible method of liberation for her and for pay. This is alongside that idea earlier mentioned, as an autistic viewer, that you can see her finding the negatively weird and irrational behaviour which is supposed to be "normal" with the curiosity I and likely others on the spectrum have felt.

At one point in Lisbon, especially with the distinct costume designs by Holly Waddington, I could not help but think of Frank Henenlotter's Frankenhooker (1990), a deliberately tasteless title for a ridiculous premise he literally had to create within seconds in a pitch meeting but made into a memorable horror-comedy, but this becomes the logical progression of what that film hinted at but could not get to. That being how male figures built the perfect woman literally and metaphorically, a daughter surrogate here for Godwin and a perfect lover Duncan, only for her to become fully of her free will, a force of energy stomping around whilst the men are the exasperated ones who cannot comprehend she will not just be their idealised template for them to own. Ruffalo, who got a Best Supporting Actor nomination alongside Stone for Best Actress at the Academy Awards, is the perfect figure for this, the erudite git who gets the funniest lines when he cannot control and dictate what Bella is as a person, finding her way in her own logic and prodding his contradictory mood swings.

You tend to forget, when multiplexes are a place of usually teen friendly films, that we still can have very adult films in violence and sexually explicit themes once in a while, but normally not screened in the middle of a pleasant afternoon, especially when this gets to Bella eventually learning the complex realities of life and how to be empowered whilst working in a brothel in France. The deadpan nature depicting this type of content, even moments of extreme violence, however has been with Yorgos Lanthimos since his earlier films. What I did not expect him, whilst his cinematographer Robbie Ryan was inspired by Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 adaptation of Dracula², was to also have gone from a template for the New Greek Weird Wave of films of stark minimalism to possibly being inspired by Tim Burton all whilst retaining his own maximalist style.

The first act, Bella's childhood before she leaves her father's home, is almost entirely monochrome with a fish eyed lens to distort the world around her. A part of this helps lead the viewer gently into this world, as much as a film with prominent CGI effects alongside the practical ones as Godwin's home is populated with incredibly strange and well done animal hybrids never explained but he clearly created, like bulldog chicken hybrids or the duck dog. Burton is apt a comparison as, whilst sexual desire only occasionally crept into his films, Burton liked played with the macabre and sickly humorous, and with some of his films being as gory as this occasionally gets into, there is unexpected bedfellows with this film even if we get into themes of its own creators. Lanthimos is not that different in the morbid humour here, barring that he adds as well his own touches, his own influences in the artistic style of the film and his interest the viewing humanity like a scientist watches bacteria under a microscope, examining their weird behaviours since Kinetta (2005).

The more explicit politics is different to Burton too, at least in how they are treated here openly, really cemented when we get to Bella being on a ship between oceans and beginning to learn the harsh realities of life through a legitimate cynic played by Jerrod Carmichael. It never becomes heavy handed here due to the sense of humour this introduces between these moments, be it Mark Ruffalo having a meltdown learning his money has been donated to charity, to the brothel Madame in France played by Kathryn Hunter, covered in tattoos, having a frank and thoughtful attitude to her profession, open to Bella's inquisitiveness and for all her female employees whilst with a habit of playful love bites for her young female employees. The one moment where this gets close to heavy handedness to a detriment is addressing Bella's origins, needed to close her arch and introduce Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), who is arguably a stereotype due to the little time we get to fully flesh out his true evil. Of her past, he represents what is evil, the colonial soldier who says Jesus would beat her up with a baseball bat, as her husband from the past, for her sins, and yet abuses his staff for fun and believes in female circumcision. He is still worth having as he presents the last example of masculinity needed to be castrated in the film, the toxic patriarch, and the one closest to the period setting whose form still sadly permeates Western culture, the colonialist who with his home full of weapons and appropriate African icons distort the likes of the Christ's teachings to be pure white male empowerment fantasies, that of dictating the world to everyone not Anglo-Saxon or male. He is the true villain, as even Godwin for his crimes, including trying to create a new Bella, becomes in a nuisance to the film's virtue the father to her daughter she accepts and loves even for all his mistakes. In contrast, Blessington is the figure you need to see who makes even Ruffalo's Duncan just misguided. He argues, for a film already close to two and a half hours, that it needed to be three hours, to deal with the real challenge that enforces Bella's full growth as a figure, particularly as we could have gotten into more explicit issues of class conflict and colonial attitudes, and without losing the resolution we get, [Spoilers] involving goat's brains [Spoilers End].

In context to mainstream cinema, the stereotype rather than the reality including the image perceived of Best Picture Oscar nominees in the past, Poor Things is magnificently bonkers, transgressive and visually resplendent cinema that is to be appreciated. It is a delightfully expressive film, dealing with grim subjects still of the director's cinema but at a point he was able to escape being stereotyped to one form of cinema only. He fully emphasises the true meaning of the auteur theory, that this is his film but where we have to rightly credit as well the differences that came from the figures who contributed to this specific film - great performances, great scriptwriting, great production design from the sets to the model shot work, and a great score from Jerskin Fendrix, making his debut here in composing for a film, who at times evokes the scores Michael Nyman enriched the films of Peter Greenaway with, a huge compliment from my part to nod to. With knowledge Lanthimos tracked down Alasdair Gray before his 2019 passing to adapt the novel, only to learn of Gray's admiration of Dogtooth the film itself¹, adds a wonderful emotional bow to the work, which this was clearly a labour of love for Yorgos Lanthimos. He was able to clearly make a film without compromise, and Lanthimos and everyone in the production of this should pat themselves on the back, on the image onscreen or behind them, for the accomplishment.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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1) Exclusive: Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos on Creating a Woman Free of Shame in Poor Things, written by Emma Specter and published by Vogue for May 31th 2023.

2) Poor Things’ cinematographer on lighting a sex comedy, being inspired by Francis Ford Coppola, written by Jason Struss and published by Digital Trends on December 9th 2023.