Poor Things Reviewed
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Year: 2023
Language: English
Shaun’s Score: 2.8/5 ★
Before Watching:
You’re walking down 9th Avenue in midtown Manhattan, dodging teenagers accosting strangers for TikTok likes and gaggles of Hell’s Kitchen gays doing ketamine after making a seventeen-year-old waitress split the drag brunch bill1 across twenty-nine American Express cards. You step in (hopefully dog?) poop, but you can’t stop to scrape it off or the Elmos will prey on your weakness and descend on you like vultures to a rotting carcass. Traffic is at a standstill and you watch two rats fight over a piece of KFC chizza that was dropped in disgust. So far, an above-average day in New York. Suddenly, Billy Eichner pops out from one of those Jewish tunnels and shoves a microphone in your face. “For a dollar, name a classic feminist story?”
Frankenstein is likely not the first answer that comes to mind. And yet, Mary Shelley2 invented an entire genre of literature while also crafting a timeless parable of bodily autonomy. Poor Things (the new Golden Lion-winner from one of today’s best filmmakers, Yorgos Lanthimos) purports to also be a striking entry into the feminist canon, but the true connection to Frankenstein’s brilliance is lost somewhere along the chain of “male director and male screenplay writer adapt a male-written novel about feminism.” It’s almost comical how their version of empowerment is just “let’s have Emma Stone f*ck a lot”—all clit, no wit.
Stone plays Bella Baxter, a Frankenhooker-esque young woman who has been reanimated by the eccentric scientist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Her post-op personality is jejune, absorbing the world with an ingenuous, childlike wonder; she loves everything from punching people to pleasuring herself.3 Godwin (whom Bella just calls “God” in the most heavy-handed construct) brings on protégé medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) to observe her development, who instead just develops feelings for Bella. But before he can (as the kids say) lock that down, the lascivious lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) sweeps Bella away to see the outside world. Well, they mostly see the inside of a hotel room. But still, Bella embarks on an adventure of pleasure, curiosity, and self-discovery. After one romp, she asks “Why do people not do this all the time?” Some people certainly do.
Repeat after me: just because a movie wins an award at a festival, it does not automatically become haute cinema. Somehow, Anatomy of a Fall keeps racking up awards and Poor Things is not far behind. Lanthimos has wrapped the blandest of takes in a visually stunning steampunk fantasia, drenching the audience with sex in order to distract us from the lack of meaning. How much will we forsake in the quest for production design? The poorest things of all are the Academy and the Venetian judges for thinking this was a diamond in the Ruffalo when it’s much more a Willem daFaux pas.
Poor Things premiered at the 80th Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion. It is still available in select theaters worldwide, and will be streaming on Hulu March 7th.
After Watching:
I swear Yorgos will keep using progressively wider lenses until eventually his films can only be screened through Apple Vision Pro goggles and you see the cameraman behind you. The fisheye lens starts feeling a bit queasy really fast.
The technical feats of the film, however, are not to be understated—even the acting is mostly impressive. Poor Things serves the audience an endless stream of spectacle to guffaw at, with an entire world built on a soundstage. Lanthimos’s artistic brilliance is present, even if his typical story quality is beyond a Stone’s throw away (so to speak). Apparently, the source material includes a revelation that the whole story has been from Max’s fantasy perspective, but we don’t get that here. And I’m not even going to touch on how rotten the subtext of consent, maturity, and desecration is, but I’m sure you noticed that already...
Poor Things lifts the most insipid tropes from Barbie and Flowers for Algernon (and maybe M3GAN if she served literal c*nt?), bolstering them behind dressing Mark Ruffalo up like he’s in Paddington 2. If you want to see a better film that goes where this could have gone if it wasn’t so preoccupied with coitus, try Titane (2021)—now that is a festival award-winner with real, biting feminism. Poor Things, by contrast, is too self-assured. Sexuality is a prison, then a liberation, then a prison again… the world is oppressive, youth is fleeting, yada yada. Watch this movie with your most conservative friend to watch their face melt at the number of “furious jumping” scenes.
Bottomless mimosas are the glue holding together Manhattan’s sanity.
Who was only twenty years old at the time of novel’s first publication in 1818.
The most relatable character in 2023 cinema. At one point, she says “I must go punch that baby.”