Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek auteur behind such rich mind-benders as Dogtooth, The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and The Favourite, has never made a film that goes down as easily as Poor Things, his picaresque new sexual odyssey. Reuniting with Favourite star Emma Stone (also a producer here) and Favourite co-screenwriter Tony McNamara, Lanthimos has turned Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel into vibrant, frequently hilarious, consistently surprising adult fantasy. It’s lurid but never tacky; subversive but never cynical; whimsical but never twee. Lanthimos has taken a premise that could easily be a porn film—a young woman, resurrected from the dead with the mind of an infant, discovers that her carnal appetites outpace even her accelerated mental growth—and fashioned it into a feminist battle cry that plays like an R-rated and more visually arresting companion to Barbie.
Reanimated woman Bella Baxter, embodied in gangly limbed, rag-doll strides by Stone, turns out to be one of the great screen innocents, even as she quickly outwits the various men who wish to control her. She’s the unnatural offspring of mad scientist Godwin Baxter (a prosthetic-caked Willem Dafoe), whose mansion/laboratory is populated by unholy amalgamations of chickens, dogs, ducks, and goats. (That Bella refers to him by the abbreviation “God” doesn’t seem any more heavy-handed in the context of the film than her habit of referring to herself in the third person.) God has a habit of belching out balloon-like bubbles of some artificial substance he’s concocted to replace his stomach’s missing digestive juices, a recurring visual gag that—like everything else about this movie—is not nearly as gross as it sounds. When Bella discovers onanism, but not the shame that often accompanies it, God scolds her: “Cease working yourself immediately!”
God hires young medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef)—“a conventional mind straining almost to mediocrity,” in his divine estimation—to observe Bella and document the way her vocabulary and understanding of the world evolve throughout their play sessions. Soon Max is bewitched by her, but it’s when God brings in Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, living it up as a specimen of louche twit we’ve never seen him play before) to draw up legal papers to permit the marriage between Bella and Max that the movie finds a rich new vein. Wedderburn sweeps Bella off on a voyage to Lisbon, boasting after one early tryst, “You’ve just been thrice fucked by the best.”
When Bella leaves the grounds of God’s residence to venture in the wider world, cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who earned an Oscar nomination for The Favourite, switches from Gothic black-and-white to pastel-dominated color. (The black-and-white material is occasionally framed as though seen through a peephole, or a pinhole camera. I’ll confess that whatever Lanthimos was trying to convey through this device escaped me.) This pastel palette sustains the tale on through to Paris, by which time Bella has outgrown Mr. Wedderburn, and rather than live on as a kept woman, she chooses to seek employment—at a brothel.
Bella proposes that the working girls ought to choose which clients they service rather than the other way round, sorta like Norma Rae’s Victorian sex worker alter ego. It’s here that the film introduces us to its next enigmatic creation, the madam, Mrs. Prim (Vicki Pepperdine). She doesn’t have Bella’s intellectual gifts, but she has plenty to teach her young charge about guile. Also, she has a taste for biting Bella. Poor Things is a kinky move.
It’s not quite a perfect one. Comedian Jerrod Carmichael, playing a fellow traveler on Bella and Duncan’s cruise ship, has the thankless task of sitting on a deck chair in a flamboyant suit and giving voice to the film’s self-deterministic theme, speaking aloud the kind of observations Stone is given leave to show us. He’s a talented performer, but not on the same wavelength as his castmates.
If the final act takes a more stringent, less playful course than what has come before, belatedly introducing an openly misogynistic villain, at least we get to watch the bastard get his. Poor Things is the latest evidence that it’s Lanthimos’—and Stone’s—Mojo Dojo Casa House. The rest of us are just living in it.
Poor Things, which was nominated on Dec. 11 for seven Golden Globes including Best Director and Best Actress, opens at area theaters on Dec. 14.