{A} pregnant woman kills herself and her unborn child by jumping from a bridge. A Frankenstein-esque doctor then takes the brain from her child and puts it into her skull, bringing his creation to life. That’s the starting premise of Poor Things, a movie by Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, based on the Scottish writer Alisdair Gray’s 1992 novel by the same name.
Hooked? Wait: It gets weirder.
Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) begins life anew under the benevolent supervision of her creator and guardian Dr. Godwin Baxter, (Willem Dafoe) in Victorian London. To keep Bella close, in part out of concern for her, in part out of a selfish desire to control her, Godwin offers her in marriage to his assistant scientist Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) under two conditions: They promise to always live with him and Bella agrees. But their plan is thrown off course when Bella runs off with the lawyer employed to oversee the contract, the caddish Duncan (Mark Ruffalo), who takes her globetrotting on a sex-crazed odyssey. The ensuing adventure becomes the making of her (at least, that’s the idea) and the ruin of Duncan, as Max and Godwin patiently await her return like the emasculated duo they are.
Much in the movie, like Bella herself, is experimental. First, what genre is this? Sci-fi? Fantasy? Comedy? Romance? Then there are the strange camera angles, switching between black and white and color, and the clever and surprising props such as a bubble-producing machine to assist Godwin’s digestive system and a motorized carriage decorated with a horse’s head for purely aesthetic purposes (hilarious). At points, the unnerving score by Jerskin Fendrix — which was ghastly, albeit effective — sounded like screaming. All this was underscored by Lanthimos’s full-hearted embrace of grotesque: a scene in which Max removes Godwin’s tumor, Bella vomiting in public, even Godwin’s appearance, resembling more Frankenstein’s monster than Frankenstein himself, which we’re told is the result of abuse endured by Godwin as a child and subject in his father’s experiments. There was only one aspect of banality: the movie’s many, many sex scenes.
Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Poor Things attempts to address serious moral questions. But rather than taking on the Romantic preoccupation with love and nature, Poor Things has as its perennial focus more contemporary concerns: sex and the patriarchy. Godwin, whom Bella calls “God” for short, does not believe in “souls,” or religion, but nevertheless explains to Max that Bella “is a being of free will.” What he really means is that she has agency, and no man can tell her what to do. (Men in this movie are invariably underwhelming; though Dafoe does get a B+ for his attempt at a Scottish accent.)
When they begin their affair, Duncan warns Bella not to fall in love him. There is no danger of that since Bella doesn’t love anyone. In an amusing twist, Duncan is soon driven mad by jealousy. After casually dabbling in prostitution, Bella informs Duncan that he was better in bed than a paying customer, a comparison which “gladdens” her “heart towards” him yet drives him to start pulling out his hair. Her perplexity at his moral hypocrisy, a recurring theme, is well-written and well-acted.
Kathryn Hunter is superb in the role of Madam Swiney, the Parisian brothel owner, and delivers some of the most memorable lines. At several bizarre instances, she violently bites Bella, driven by a mad desire to consume beauty. When Bella complains that a customer made no effort to make her comfortable, Madam Swiney explains perceptively: “Some men enjoy that you do not like it.” Madam tells her that horror and degradation “make us whole,” and improve a person to something more than “flighty child with no substance.” Which almost sounds convincing, but in Bella’s case does not apply.
In Frankenstein, the creature is desperate for love. In Poor Things, Bella’s hunger is for experience. But to what end? The answers, when attempted at all, are much too abstract. She wants to become familiar with the ways of the world so that she may help “improve it.” She weeps at the sight of children dying of poverty. She reads voraciously. Yet in her own life, seemingly nothing wounds her.
When she discovers her morbid origins, she shrugs it off, telling Godwin: “I am enjoying being alive.” The return of her husband, Alfie (Christopher Abbott) — which happens late in the movie — is dismissively and hurriedly explained; he viewed her as “territory” and was very cruel, a misogynist monster, etc. In the absence of sustained character development, Victoria’s (which was Bella’s name before she was Bella) initial act of suicide appears less an act of desperation than one of boredom.
This sort of glibness is manifest in Max, too, who we are supposed to believe is a man ahead of his times but is really a hapless cuck. When Bella returns, having prostituted herself out of mere curiosity, he concludes that while he is “jealous” of the time she spent in bed with other men, “It is your body, Bella Baxter; yours to give freely.” Eh, ok, but what about her suitability as a spouse? Bella finds Max “adorable,” like a puppy. There is no evidence that she loves or even respects him.
In Gray’s novel, Bella Baxter denies the account of her origins, claiming to be the product of the feverish imagination of her husband. The movie might have been improved by this framing. Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bella Baxter is highly amusing and original, but impossible to take seriously.