You can’t call Emma Stone overly cautious. The Oscar-winning actor, who has managed to successfully traverse the popcorn and arthouse worlds, has taken on a character that, in its basic form on the page — with no understanding of the filmmaker behind it — would send most actors’ agents and publicists spinning. Her risk-taking performance in Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest film Poor Things is sure to be one of the most talked about, and, likely, celebrated, of 2023.
In the movie, which won the Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival, Emma plays Bella Baxter. She lives in a strangely spun Victorian London, in the home of master scientist and surgeon Dr Godwin Baxter (a deformed Willem Dafoe) who, it turns out, rescued her dead body from the city’s murky waters after a successful suicide attempt. Bella had another life before this – she was pregnant, and bore a different name – but in a moment of scientific curiosity fed down to him by his father, Dr. Godwin (whose name is often aptly shortened to God) took her body, performed a caesarean birth and replaced the woman soon to be known as Bella’s brain with that of her unborn child’s. Now, Bella stomps like an infant around a grandiose house-cum-surgery, learning 15 words a day, pissing herself, surrounded by his strange hybrid creations of Dr Godwin’s. Goats with duck heads wander the halls; pigs with pug bodies scurry around the garden.
It’s unclear how much time passes in the film’s first chapter, which is set exclusively in the home and presented entirely in black-and-white, but in it Bella gradually learns: about blood (“bud,” she pronounces it) and romance, concepts fuelled by the arrival of Dr. Godwin’s protege Max McCandles, played by Ramy Youssef. She also discovers, by chance, sexual gratification. Still very much in the choppy words and infantile mannerisms stage of her new life, she masturbates and climaxes at the kitchen table.
After being swept away from her home, in a part-abduction, part-willing escape thanks to a buffoonish bachelor named Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), the film bursts into colour with an intense and comical sex scene. Bella, in her stilted language, continually refers to the act as “furious jumping”.
They travel from London, to Lisbon, to Athens and Paris, in a spectacularly rendered universe. Skies change from candy floss colours to cosmic; buildings and boats bulge like the pressured seams of a fat man’s suit; interiors are plush and surreal. Meanwhile, Bella’s costumes, courtesy of designer Holly Waddington, resemble surgeon’s outfits, Alice in Wonderland-esque dresses and Elizabethan gowns. Baroque art in fabric form. With Robbie Ryan’s cinematography, which switches from disorienting fish eye shots, to scenarios framed as if seen through a keyhole, to vibrant full beam colour, it feels like a Tim Walker fashion portrait in motion. It is, undeniably, Yorgos’ visual masterwork.
With this journey, Bella learns that autonomy is possible. She rocks up to a strangely beautiful brothel and finds the idea of having sex with a man who chooses her, not the other way around, absurd. Duncan, it transpires, is maybe the baby here. At one point, he — assuming he still has ownership over her — calls Bella a “whore”. Women are, in fact, “our own means of production”, she replies.
The humour is as bone-dry and discomforting as many of the gags in other Yorgos films. This one follows The Favourite, and although it feels similar in terms of grandiosity and scale, the unorthodox nature of its subject matter will likely cause one group of viewers to flock to it in morbid curiosity, and others to run from it in abject disgust.
That base level plot, a film about a woman and baby swirled together and toyed with by a male scientist, held captive and fucked, is bound to cause raised eyebrows amongst the cynics and the prudish. Ultimately, no Yorgos film is complete without controversy or provocation. He is not a filmmaker who toes the middle ground, and Poor Things is a work of cinematic extremism in subject and style. To be offended by it without seeing it is to bite the beautiful, nasty bait that Yorgos Lanthimos loves to lay.
‘Poor Things’ will be released on 9 December. This film was reviewed at the Venice Film Festival 2023.