The Media Tourist

Emma Stone puts a stridently fem-centric Franken-spin on a fabulously freaky tale

Poor Things
Starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo & Willem Dafoe
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Dec. 8

A young woman breaks free of stuffy Victorian society in this elegantly weird, delightfully far-out skewering of class, culture and carnality.

But Bella isn’t just any young woman—she’s the experimental creation of a mad-scientist surgeon that she calls “God.” Because to her, he is. Dr. Godwin Baxter gave new life to an anonymous woman he’d found after she’d committed suicide by jumping off a bridge to her death. He reanimated her lifeless body with electricity and the transplanted brain of a prenatal infant taken from her own womb. And he named her Bella, Latin for beautiful.  

Emma Stone is mesmerizing as Bella, a beautifully almost-grown adult when we meet her, just now to the point—with her developing brain—of learning how to eat, walk and talk. Willem Dafoe plays Baxter, his face a horrendous roadmap of scarry, maimed disfigurement from surgical experiments. Ramy Youssef (from the Hulu comedy series Ramy) is the earnest young med student hired to record Bella’s progress who finds himself falling in love with his endearingly odd subject. When a caddish Lothario (Mark Ruffalo) steals Bella away for his own lascivious enjoyment, it marks the beginning of her wide-ranging odyssey of self-discovery, of always wanting more and wanting better, and finding out who she is, what she wants and what makes her happy.

And that includes sex, and a lot of it. Sexual liberation, Bella learns, is just one of the freedoms of womanhood, and being whole as a woman. Be prepared: You’ll get an eyeful of body parts you might not be accustomed to seeing in movies with major, well-known actors.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos is known for his highly stylized, deliriously bonkers provocations in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Favourite (which also starred Stone) and The Lobster. In this brilliant, black-comedy sci-fi parable—based on a 1992 satirical novel by Scottish author Alastar Grey—he creates a richly detailed wonderland for Bella to experience and explore and bring her ever-expanding mind up to speed with her body. She learns how to dance (in one of the movie’s most exhilarating scenes), develops empathy for the poor, absorbs philosophy, works in a Paris brothel (with a madam played by Kathryn Hunter, who portrayed all three witches in The Tragedy of Macbeth), and ultimately discovers her own mysterious past.

Frequently caustically funny, it’s hyper-visual and packed with marvelous detail. There are strange characters (including a man who walks like a crab, another with a claw for an arm), fabulous clothes, fantastical sights and expansive, period-piece sets, as if the movie has tapped into a brainstorm of gonzo ideas from Monty Python, Tim Burton and Wes Anderson. Seeing some of Dr. Baxter’s other “experiments,” like a chicken with the transplanted head of a dog, and watching some moments through a fish-eye lens, we know we’re in a skewed, wackadoo, off-kilter world, accentuated by an appropriately off-key, atonal soundtrack signaling that something’s…not quite right. But hey, look at that! And that!

And you can’t help looking at Bella, as her innocence, candor, guileless self-expression and effusive embrace of femininity becomes threatening to men—the real “poor things,” pitiable, sometimes pathetically needy creatures. One of them even plans to surgically remove part of her female anatomy, which he thinks has made her hyper-sexed and uncontrollable.

This fem-centic Frankenstein-y tale is a daring parable about the rights of women in a world where men try to make them, mold them, possess them, use them, lock them up and contain them. In having none of that, Bella, who ultimately learns that kindness is key to countering life’s beastly cruelties, becomes a vibrantly potent avatar for female liberation and empowerment, in all its forms.

And Emma Stone, miles away from one La La Land, finds herself dancing up a lusty storm in another.

—Neil Pond