No one else but director Yorgos Lathimos (The Favourite) could’ve pulled such an anarchic take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Based on the novel by Alasdair Gray and with a screenplay by Tony McNamara, the movie scales such delightfully riotous, debauched, and original frames on the idea of women—in this case, one woman, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone)—defying male patriarchy and the notion that they control, nay, created women’s evolution and hence can set up barricades around their sense of thought, body, and sexuality, that I ended rooting for Ms. Baxter even as I couldn’t help but guffaw at the total hopelessness of the men in the movie who think they can lay claim over her agency. Opening the movie in a timeline forever unknown, a Gothic, black-and-white, locomotive-breath fisheye shots of Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) and his bizarre human experiment on Bella, his ward, the director peeps into the good doctor’s past (who Bella calls “God”) to explain the scars on his face that look like a cake cutting contest gone wrong to explain his empirical reasoning on human life and behavior.
Appointing Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) to dutifully note Bella’s progress across her physical coordination—a weird, puppet-like baby cruising—and mental growth scaling the axis of phonemic awareness, God is aware that she’ll need a life-long companion and quickly pivots to Max, who, like a ship already drawn to a magnetic lighthouse, quickly acquiesces. But Bella’s busy breaking the empirical boundaries set on her, her quirky epistemophilic urge pushing her to push the boundaries of acceptable societal norms, and her own sexual awakening that begins with the accidental discovery of the pleasure of masturbation into her venture into full-blown sex. The latter is thanks to the gadabout rake Duncan Wedderburn, a lawyer and pompous self-anointed Casanova. Mark Ruffalo plays Wedderburn with a madcap force of physical slapstick and fun, and after his entry, the movie lifted a couple of floors into aural pleasure for Bella and me.
As Bella’s sexual autonomy and mental acuity grow hand-in-hand (no pun intended), the men around her melt into raging clouds of testosterone that burst into salty rains of helplessness. Director Lathimos, with cinematographer Robbie Ryan, swivels from the claustrophobic view of God’s steampunked labyrinth into full-blown color (which happens in the blink of an eye as she’s astride her first sexual encounter) into something magical, haunting, and phantasmagorical, as her experiences broaden with philosophical interactions aboard a luxury liner. The frames drip with the heat of erotica coated in the capsule of rapid societal awareness and discriminatory practices, the unfairness of the haves and have-nots hitting Bella with the force of an incoming arrow. Adding to the nervous energy, rising tensions and biting satire are composer Jerskin Fendrix’s dissonant notes that slowly come together to form a knowing symphony juxtaposed with Bella’s ever-increasing awareness.
But it is Emma Stone (also producing) who owns the movie with her taut, flighty physicality. And those aren’t just the sex scenes, but her occupying every frame with the perkiness of rising knowledge, an assured nuance that slowly fills her unsure physical and mental form. It’s a testament to how our blank slates, easily identifying and marking rights and wrongs, begin to twist facts and behaviors to subjugate and dominate genders and classes. Make no mistake, Lathimos and she are here to put the fear of Bella in God and all men.
Movie data powered by IMDb. All images owned by the producers. Poor Things is streaming on Disney+ Hotstar and rated A (For adults only)
Poor Things
Director Yorgos Lathimos Time 2h21m
Writers Tony McNamara, Alasdair Gray (based on the book by)
Stars Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo, Ramy Youssef
