POOR THINGS, Greek absurdist Yorgos Lanthimos’s eighth feature, is a fantastical adaptation of the late Scottish author Alasdair Gray’s 1992 titular novel, adapted by Tony McNamara, after their fruitful collaboration in THE FAVOURITES (2018). Godwin 'God' Baxter (a bubble-belching Dafoe, generating warmth and peculiar discernment under his disfiguring make-up) is a Victoria-era scientist who implants a suicide victim with the brain of her own unborn child. She is Bella (Stone), a new-born creature progresses exponentially fast to explore the world outside, and ending up tearing down the last fig leaf of the polite and prudish society.

For those who are conversant with Lanthimos’s oeuvres, the diegesis of POOR THINGS is less left-field and brutalizing than his previous films co-written with Efthimis Filippou. Gray’s story is a revamped Frankenstein-style yarn with an emboldened feminist disposition, only Bella is not a horrendous monster, but a fetching woman, an ever-curious tabula rosa, driven to assimilate knowledges and experience life to the maximum. Naturally, untainted by traditional, often prejudiced moral standards, Bella’s outlandish behavior, without a soupçon of shame about her body, nudity and libido, her irreverence, spontaneity and unadulterated goodness becomes a mirror reflecting our society’s own hypocrisy, sexism, paternalism and sheer cruelty.

Starting in bleached monochrome, POOR THINGS marks its time with Jerskin Fendrix’s woodwinds-heavy, strangely otherworldly, almost atonal score (mimicking Bella’s inarticulate phase), until an insatiable curiosity towards the world compels Bella to voyage with a raffish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo) after she is hand-fasted to the aw-shucks Max McCandles (Youssef, the salt of the earth type), God’s diligent assistant. Then suddenly, utterly lush, highly saturated color suffuses the screen and assaults our sensorium like nobody’s business. The film (mostly by virtue of James Price and Shona Heath’s production design and Zsuzsa Mihalek’s set design) disposes stunningly painted sets, on a large soundstage, a tremendous undertaking that not only pays tribute to Hollywood’s Golden-age filmmaking, but also pays handsome dividends to its own artistic merits of artificial craft, often in conjunction with Lanthimos’s distinct fish-eye view shots or wide-angle movements. The Lisbon set is particularly and surrealistically breathtaking, and Bella’s doe-eyed maundering spirits audience together into a world of faerie.

From relishing in carnal knowledge and hedonism, opening up to philosophy and cynicism, then witnessing suffering of the poor and splashing out to salve her conscience, further liberating her body in a Parisian demimonde (under the wings of Kathryn Hunter’s Madame Swiney, who is another grotesquery from a different realm), experimenting with lesbianism and socialism, until facing the monster of a husband from her previous identity, General Alfie Blessington (Abbott, a chilling villain with a baby face, which is all the more disturbing), Bella accomplishes her circle of experiences by taking the baton from God, and becomes wise as ever, it is a tailor-made compendium to swim with the tide of woman empowerment, so what is not to like except that it is exactly what make for a virtuous admonishment which can only preach to the choir?

Actually POOR THINGS is at its most rollicking when it falls back on physical comedy to sharpen Bella’s alterity and doesn’t take itself too serious. Like the unorthodox relationship between Bella and Duncan, with Ruffalo making the most of his under-utilized drollness as a clingy rake, to complement Stone’s imposing tour de force, who really goes for it with all she can offer, both physically and emotionally. Her performance is showy, wacky and polyphonic, Stone commands our undivided attention stoutheartedly, but if there is a want, it is that all her affectionately conveyed emotion can seldom register a resonance here, viewers are profoundly amused, entertained, but never touched.

That is the Allies heel of POOR THINGS, Bella is a more a symbol than a character audience can relate to, there is no frisson which is so arresting in Frankenstein’s monster, of the fine balance between his naivety and barbarity. And when she gradually acts like a normie in the latter phase of the film, she is relegated to an almost almighty pedagogue deigning to teach a lesson or two to the thick-skinned, ahem, can she penetrate that?

referential entries: Yorgos Lanthimos’s THE FAVOURITES (2018, 8.0/10); THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER (2017, 6.9/10).

Title: Poor Things

Year: 2023

Country: UK, USA, Ireland

Language: English, French, Portuguese

Genre: Comedy, Romance, Drama

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Screenwriter: Tony McNamara

Based on the novel by Alasdair Gray

Music: Jerskin Fendrix

Cinematography: Robbie Ryan

Editor: Yorgos Mavropsaridis

Cast:

Emma Stone

Mark Ruffalo

Willem Dafoe

Ramy Youssef

Christopher Abbott

Kathryn Hunter

Jerrod Carmichael

Hanna Schygulla

Margaret Qualley

Vicki Pepperdine

Suzy Bemba

Damien Bonnard

Carminho

Raphaël Thiéry

Rating: 7.9/10