POOR THINGS - Mark Reviews Movies

Poor Things, Searchlight Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 7, 2023

Full of warped wonders and diving into a holistic view of humanity, Poor Things is a wildly imaginative fairy tale about the challenges and joys of being alive. Yes, it's a dark, twisted, and often hedonistic view of the world and people, featuring a mad scientist and unholy experiments and a good amount of sex in just about every imaginable position. However, there's a vigorously beating heart, as well as a fully active mind, within this material, which also happens to feature a fantastic and unique character at its core.

She's called Bella Baxter, and as played by Emma Stone, this woman, the result of a death-defying experiment that transplants the brain of a baby into a recently deceased adult body, runs the full gamut of physical, psychological, intellectual, and emotional development in a relatively brief period of time. In her early moments, she's spitting out food that she finds disagreeable and stumbling on her feet like a toddler. By the end of her journey, Bella has become solid and upright in her posture, her deeper understanding of herself, and her philosophical worldview of who people are and what they need to be in order to live a fulfilling life.

It's a bold, daring, and constantly evolving performance, with Stone making each and every step of the character's transformation comprehensible, richly considered, and inherently funny. We get the sense that the actor knows she has never come across a character of such vitality and possibility before now—and likely may not ever find one such as Bella again in her career. Stone embraces the chance to play someone as singular as this character to the fullest, and that dedication helps to make this gimmicky figure and this admittedly ridiculous premise feel as real as they possibly could.

That's not to downplay the efforts of screenwriter Tony McNamara (adapting Alasdair Gray's novel) and director Yorgos Lanthimos, though. For here, we do have a story that's fairly fundamental in terms of its plotting and the arc of the central figure. McNamara, though, uses that basic structure as a springboard for a wealth of ideas about growing up, the course and fixations of the steps of individual development, and how each of us relate to each other—within the dynamics of assorted relationships, between men and women, and of a society that creates hierarchies, puts up barriers among various castes and categorizations of people, and levels judgment against anyone who even dares to question the status quo. This world is our own in every way, except that it exists as funhouse mirror variation of it.

Lanthimos, a filmmaker who seems intrinsically drawn to material that conveys such a distorted but recognizable reflection of people and the world, has found a perfect match for his comedic, satirical, and tonal preoccupations with this film. In the clever and colorful ways he depicts the out-of-time and within-the-imagination look of this world, though, the director rises to another step of his creative prowess. It's a hauntingly beautiful vision that looks like something out of a storybook—but is never so overwhelming that it overshadows the emotional and intellectual core of the tale.

That belongs to Bella, who was a despondent pregnant woman in the former life of the body her new brain now inhabits. The body was discovered by Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a physically and psychologically scarred scientist, who found the corpse after this woman jumped to her death from a London bridge. In a lengthy black-and-white sequence that has cinematographer Robbie Ryan harkening back to the monster movies of the 1930s, we watch the doctor reanimate the corpse that now has an infant's brain in its skull, try to teach his creation (who refers to him as "God") the basics of living, and hire medical student Max (Ramy Youssef) to observe Bella's progress.

The student falls in love with Bella, who soon learns about the joys of sex and decides to run off with a lothario of an attorney named Duncan (a pointedly goofy Mark Ruffalo, as the worst of male domineering insecurity—until a third act surprise). He likes the idea of having control over her, and she quite likes the "vigorous jumping," since her language skills begin as those of a child, the two do. The film's switch from black-and-white to vivid, otherworldly color is one of the many, very funny jokes here—as a well as a pretty clear sign about how important sex is to the story's scheme.

The rest of the journey has Bella traveling across Europe, discovering Duncan's true nature, and meeting a whole cast of other mentors and fellow travelers on the path to self-discovery and enlightenment. It's quite simple, of course, but the details, in terms of the artistic flourishes of the world and the precise charting of how and why Bella undergoes those various changes, are what elevate that story, these characters, and those multiple thematic concerns.

Listing them would be a fool's errand, because the manor and laboratory of the scientist, who turns out to be more traumatically wounded and confusedly compassionate than mad, offer one slew of sights (animals with swapped heads, a transplant mechanism for gastric acid, and the gizmos and whatsits of his lab), while each location of Bella's trip—London, Lisbon, a cruise ship, Alexandria, Paris—possesses its own aesthetic flavor and spectacle.

Lisbon is an idyllic coastal town, punctuated by pink-hued clouds. The ship spews sickly green steam beneath a star-filled sky, and Alexandria is marked by the juxtaposition of an ancient marvel and the ageless poverty below that towering edifice. Paris during a snowy winter starts Bella's process of learning about politics, the economy, and just how many men want to have sex with her.

That's neither the beginning nor the end, though, of her evolution, as young lust and infatuation for Duncan turn ugly when the guy shows the desperation underneath his fake confidence, an older woman (played by Hanna Schygulla) teaches her there's as much pleasure to be found from exercises of the mind, and the cynical Harry (Jerrod Carmichael) gives Bella a crash course in economic inequality. Later, a Paris brothel's madam (played by Kathryn Hunter) and a fellow sex worker (played by Suzy Bemba) provide a debate between pragmatic capitalism and idealistic socialism, with a gradually awakened Bella figuring out what parts work best for herself, the people she has come to like and admire, and as many people as possible.

There's more to the story, the characters, and the ideas of Poor Things, but again, it would be a fool's errand to pick apart its many, many particulars. Basically, this is a sprawling comedic epic about the human condition and human nature's effect on society, grounded by its ideas and its unexpected compassion but elevated by its imagination, performances, and the weirdly empathetic—and jut downright weird—character at its center.

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