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.