Poor Things: Welcome to the Monster Mish-Mash

Movie info via Rotten Tomatoes:

From filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and producer Emma Stone comes the incredible tale and fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter (Stone), a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Under Baxter’s protection, Bella is eager to learn. Hungry for the worldliness she is lacking, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a slick and debauched lawyer, on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, Bella grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.Content collapsed.

Review:

If you’re a fan of Frankenstein movies from Universal to Hammer to Mel Brooks, you’ll love Poor Things, a funny and well-done pastiche of all three starring Emma Stone and directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. The movie is pretty self-aware of what is and pretty proud about it. For film fans that’s a good thing, for everyone else, not so much. Poor Things is definitely an acquired taste.

Poor Things tells the story of Bella (Stone), a strange Victorian lady with an infantile temperament but a mature body, and her deformed ward, a renowned scientist and surgeon, Dr. Goowin Baxter (Wilem Dafoe). They live with a sullen maid-nurse in a mansion full of Dr. Moreau experimental hybrids and a full mad scientist lab in the basement. The story charts her development, adventures and her learning the good and the bad of the world, mainly the male species.

The weird off kilter sets feature a hybrid (everything nonhuman is a stitch together, mashed together thing- the film’s inside Frankenstein joke) combination of steampunk and failed inventions and designs. It’s. a world that hasn’t properly come together yet and may never will. Men are the monsters here and women are the experiment waiting for consciousness raising to rebel from them or subjugate them. Poor Things cinematography reflects its sources- going from Universal Classic Monsters black and white to lurid Hammer Studios Color.

Bella hardly suffers. All of her learning, experience is taken in with great gusto, especially sex. I followed her with interest, seeing the edges fall off and the refinements smooth her into a lady of the world and superior in stratagem to the men. The movie is about her humanization, after all.

Poor Things is rich in design and color but poor in ideas and deep themes. The men never really grow. The women, outside of Bella, never refine. Bella is the only person who develop any good qualities.

Stone develops her performance discreetly with words and gestures that stop and start then seamlessly mesh as her inner development fully matures- each a better choiceof character and not the actor. If everything in Poor Things is self admiring she is the one thing truly worth the praise.