Director – Yorgos Lanthimos, Screenplay – Tony McNamara, Based on the Novel Poor Things by Alasdair Gray, Producers – Ed Guiney, Yorgos Lanthimos, Andrew Lowe & Emma Stone, Photography (some scenes b&w) – Robbie Ryan, Music – Jerskin Fendrix, Visual Effects – Cheap Shot VFX (Supervisors – Ben Perrott & Jon Van Hoey Smith), Time Based Arts & Union, Special Effects Supervisor – Gabor ‘Gege’ Kiszelly, Prosthetics Designer – Nadia Stacey, Prosthetics – Coulier Creatures FX (Designer – Mark Coulier), Production Design – Shona Heath & James Price. Production Company – Element Pictures.
Cast
Emma Stone (Bella Baxter), Mark Ruffalo (Duncan Wedderburn), Willem Dafoe (Dr Godwin Baxter), Ramy Youssef (Max McCandles), Christopher Abbott (Alfie Blessington), Vicki Pepperdine (Mrs Prim), Jerrod Carmichael (Harry Astley), Hanna Schygulla (Martha Von Kurtzroc), Kathryn Hunter (Madam Swiney), Suzy Bemba (Toinette), Margaret Qualley (Felicity)
Plot
London, the late 19th Century. The experimental surgeon Godwin Baxter hires student Max McCandles to observe his ward Bella. Max takes notes on Bella’s mindless, child-like ways and her struggle to learn about basic, everyday things. He demands to know who she is and Godwin eventually confesses that she is the dead body he found of a pregnant woman who had thrown herself from a bridge. He implanted the brain of her unborn child into her head and brought her back to life. Godwin asks Max to marry Bella on the condition that she never leave the house. Max agrees, but when they bring the lawyer Duncan Wedderburn in to draw up the legal agreement, the rakish Wedderburn becomes fascinated with Bella. Wedderburn elopes with Bella, taking her on a ship journey around Europe and a tempestuous affair, where she is fascinated with all that she learns, while proving odd when being required to adjust to social mores. However, Wedderburn is ruined when Bella gives all his money away to the poor in Greece. Dumped in Paris, Bella takes the only opportunity to hand to earn money – working in a brothel.
Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos had a breakout success with his second film Dogtooth (2009), a bizarre deadpan comedy concerning parents that have kept their children imprisoned at home their whole lives with the children only imagining the outside world. His follow-up Attenberg (2010) and Alps (2011) met mixed receptions. Lanthimos then returned with The Lobster (2015), his first English-language film, a bizarre and blackly funny effort set in a future where people are required to be in relationships at threat of being transformed into animals if they do not meet their partner. Lanthimos’s work through this period is noted for its distinctive sense of black humour and deadpan performances, focused around the depiction of weird little pocket alternate realities and of characters who disrupt social norms.
Lanthimos began to move in more mainstream directions with The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) in which Barry Keoghan places a curse on Colin Farrell’s family. This received critical plaudits but these blossomed with Lanthimos’s next film, the historical The Favourite (2018), his first pairing with Emma Stone, which saw Lanthimos nominated for an Academy Award Best Director. Poor Things received rapturous acclaim and ended up on most Best of 2023 lists, receiving multiple nominations at the Golden Globes, BAFTAs, assorted critics circles and the Academy Awards, including nominations for Best Film, Best Director and Best Actress (Emma Stone) at the latter.
The film is adapted from Poor Things (1992), a novel by Scottish writer Alisdair Gray (1934-2019), who wrote it as his own take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The Frankenstein film used to be one of the cornerstones of horror, although its significance has dropped away this side of the 2010s. The first film was Thomas Edison’s Frankenstein (1910) but it was popularised by Universal’s Frankenstein (1931) starring Boris Karloff, which led to a series of sequels and created the Mad Scientist Film. Hammer Films conducted their own successful take beginning with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) starring Peter Cushing, which led to a long-running series of sequels. Since then there have been numerous remakes of the Mary Shelley story, parodies, comedy takes, sons, daughters and monster team-ups, even erotic Frankenstein films. (For a more detailed listing see Frankenstein Films).
Emma Stone as Bella Baxter
Since The Lobster, Yorgos Lanthimos’s films have moved in far more mainstream directions. The oblique blackly deadpan sense of humour of his early works is replaced by straightforward dramatic narrative. Not to say that an eccentric and frequently offbeat sense of humour does not run all the way through Poor Things but it is a long way from Dogtooth where you sit trying to get a grip on the deadpan blackness taking place before you.
Poor Things hangs around Emma Stone’s performance. The early scenes (those that take place in black-and-white, the first 40 minutes of the film) have her as an uncontrolled wild child – a variant on The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970), albeit made with a Yorgos Lanthimos sense of humour. The film (and Emma Stone’s performance) however gains its life (and colour) once it frees Bella into the outside world. There Poor Things becomes an Outsider film with much comedic interplay with her guileless non-conformist stumblings through polite society.
Be it her ‘furious jumping’, attempts to be polite with set responses during a restaurant dinner, her and Mark Ruffalo on the dancefloor or abrupt announcements “I’m off to kill that baby,” Emma Stone wins the day in an hilarious performance. The supporting cast deliver great performances right across the board. Willem Dafoe cuts a bizarre figure with a scarred and deformed visage, the sort that is usually reserved for Frankenstein’s monster rather than the creator, and everything delivered through a Scottish accent but manages to seem perfectly at home.
Willem Dafoe as Dr Godwin Baxter, the film’s equivalent of Dr Frankenstein
The film is enormously abetted by a great script where the dialogue becomes a joyous dance. The film is also far more accurate to Frankenstein the book than most Frankenstein films in the sense that it doesn’t have the creature as a dumb, stumbling brute but allows Bella to become articulate where she is even seen reading and debating philosophy as Mary Shelley had her creature do.
As with much of the films and tv being made in the 2020s, Poor Things comes with a feminist message. It is after all about the character of Bella shucking off the yoke of various men’s attempts to control and shackle her and discovering herself. This is more the soft feminism of a film like The Bride (1985), an actual Frankenstein film concerned with the Bride’s rebellion against her creator and desiring of independence, albeit given far more of a wildly comic spin. The character of Bella and her arc is not dissimilar to the title character in Barbie (2013) (where the title role was played by Margot Robbie, an actress who is frequently confused with Emma Stone). Unlike Barbie preaching at an audience with an unappealing misandrist message, Poor Things’ feminism comes lightly couched in such a way that you can tune it out if you want but just as equally where the character’s journey is one that has you laughing and cheering along with the entire way.
The film comes with a very eccentric design scheme. Dr Baxter’s home is filled with bizarre hybrid creations in the background – a chicken with a bulldog’s head, a duck with a goat’s body and the like. The film seems to take place in a quasi-Steampunk world – airships and cable cars buzzing above the city streets in the background. Baxter takes Emma Stone on an outing in what looks like a horse-drawn carriage, which on closer look is steam-powered while the horse at the front is actually a figurehead that is steered by the coachman. Meanwhile, all of the skies are painted in impossible hyper-real colours. The interiors are a lushly beautiful array of texture and colour – daffodil-shaped fans in a cafe at one point – or odd-looking ships and buildings. Not to mention the cast, Emma Stone in particular, being outfitted in an array of eye-catching costumes – she even manages to introduce the mini-skirt to Victorian England (and without any apparent outrage).
(Winner in this site’s Top 10 Films of 2023 list. Winner for Best Director (Yorgos Lanthimos) and Best Actress (Emma Stone), Nominee for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Mark Ruffalo) and Best Production Design at this site’s Best of 2023 Awards).
