Poor Things

In Poor Things, the inexplicability of the images is charming. That is, it’s charming till they are all explicated. The production design evokes a 1930s James Whale horror flick and Emma Stone’s raw libidinal quirks have the inspired transgressiveness of the surrealist short Un Chien Andalou (1929). Willem Dafoe plays a mad scientist who looks like what would happen if Dr. Frankenstein raided Lincoln’s tomb. He belches petroleum bubbles.

When the film shifts from black-and-white to color, the palette is also a stunning recreation of Old Hollywood daydreams: sunset peach and brick-road yellow, a lapis lazuli gown as rich as a Belgian chocolate. The music, by Jerskin Fendrix, creeps and crawls like an army of ants—and there is a dance number/fight scene at a formal ball set to an instrument out of Dr. Seuss. This is all choreographed deliriously, like a lead-footed polka.

In the past, Yorgos Lanthimos’s filmmaking has been twee. He would use wide-angle lenses the way J. J. Abrams uses lens flares: weird for weird’s sake. In Poor Things, which Tony McNamara adapted from Alasdair Gray’s novel, his form vibes with the content. But impressive as his style is, its whimsicality gets weighed down by the one-track logic of the story.

Spoilers below.

The plot follows the format of a feminist Candide, or Flowers for Algernon with the tragedy inverted but the sentimentality kept in tact. Bella (Stone) has the brain of a baby transplanted into the body of its mother. A famous surgeon named Godwin (Dafoe), who refers to himself as “God,” discovered a pregnant woman who had attempted to commit suicide by jumping into the Thames. She survived the fall—but was left terminally brain-dead. God conjoined mother and child. He raises Bella as his daughter, but keeps her from exploring the outside world so as to not disrupt his experiment.

This changes when he hires his medical student Max (Ramy Youssef) to be his kind-faced Igor. Max and Bella are arranged to be wed, but the attorney who drafts the arrangement, Duncan (Mark Ruffalo), convinces her to run off to Lisbon with him. Ultimately, though, God blesses their adventure.

Duncan thinks of himself as a worldly cad, but he’s just a garden-variety product of toxic masculinity. (Ruffalo’s purse-lipped accent is a delightful slurry of mumbled harrumphs.) He falls possessively in love with her, but Bella cools on him fast, having sloughed off her infancy after making two new friends (a matronly German idealist and a self-described cynic out of Oscar Wilde) and reading half of a book. (Duncan throws it out before she can finish it.) As soon as Bella learns about inequality, she gives Duncan’s poker winnings to men who say they will give it to the poor. This leaves both of them destitute. She learns to support herself as a sex worker.

Predictably, Duncan finds this degrading. Just as predictably, Bella sees it as self-empowering. A fellow sex worker, Toinette (Suzy Bemba), educates her about socialism, and, when we see the two of them caress each other in bed, we can infer that Bella has boned up on Judith Butler as well.

In short, Poor Things is a Tim Burton Barbie. The difference is that Margot Robbie transformed from a plaything into something warmly, wonderfully human. Stone, on the other hand, goes from a baby to a know-it-all robot; Lanthimos even models the flashback to Bella’s creation on the scene from Metropolis (1927) when the labor organizer’s likeness gets scaffolded on an automaton. Bella is always sharper than everyone around her. She betrays no hint of vulnerability and there is not a mite of suspense about whether she can get out of the scrapes that her scurrilous suitors get her into.

There is a core of wit to Stone’s performance and the deliciously eccentric dialogue always caught me off-guard. But Bella’s computer-like infallibility seems a curious choice when the point of the movie is to draw attention to how men treat women as objects—with a bitingly casual sadism. (I found Ruffalo’s poise after unpacking Bella from a trunk low-key horrifying.)

In the wake of the Dobbs decision, which overturned the abortion rights granted in Rowe v. Wade, there is a renewed sense of urgency to stand up to the forces that have been systemically depriving women of their bodily autonomy for decades. I think Poor Things was intended as a protest and I admire it for its advocacy. But I don’t like the undertone of glibness. I find the age-old device of the “objective” observer—who is dropped into society cold to point out its hypocrisies—inherently smug; these tales tend to cast their tellers’ own biases as “natural,” and therefore impervious to the kind of scrutiny the objects of satire are subject to. This shades into myopia.

At the end of Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), the circus performers turn a beautiful, ableist woman who has tried to manipulate and murder one of their own into a hideous human duck. To put it simply, her cruelty makes her the true freak. But her fate is the result of the simmering escalation of her cruelty; the people who transformed her did so only as a last resort. It is clear that Browning is on their side, but one is made to feel discomfited about this outcome nonetheless. When Poor Things repeats this stunt on a vicious reactionary who makes his first appearance in the last act, one is left with no such ambiguity. Like her “father” before her, Bella is playing God. Only the audience is not encouraged to question her authority.

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