'Poor Things' is a feminist baffler worthy of dissection
Searchlight
It says a lot about a director that can deliver an effort that at times feels like a personal greatest hits compilation yet still feels distinctive and challenging, operating on a high degree of difficulty for both filmmaker and audience. “Poor Things” has more than a few bits of “Dogtooth,” “The Lobster,” and “The Favourite,” to name just three, yet Yorgos Lanthimos continues to excite on very high wires of distilled human experience.
Some may not make it through the first section, when your mind will ask questions like “What is Emma Stone doing?” and “Who is Willem Dafoe’s character?” and “It isn’t all going to be like this, is it?” No, and yes, and not really, sort of. It’s not a horror-comedy and yet it is terrifying and periodically hilarious. It’s not a period piece, though this is definitely some version of London and Portugal and Paris several hundred years ago, with a narrative intended to comment on modern ideas about love, sex, and power. Lanthimos is remarkably skilled at creating visually arresting images in service of stimulating and even dangerous intellectual exercises that scratch at societal Velcro. Some may find that troubling. That’s OK.
But a movie like “Poor Things,” which as you can see is not worth attempting to summarize plot-wise, never crosses from daring into unbearably unpleasant (unlike the Greek filmmaker’s “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” which I didn’t go for at all). As Bella, Stone takes on a part that seems like it couldn’t possibly work and then it develops and electrifies and never stops growing. Dafoe’s also stunning, as is Mark Ruffalo as a man taken with Stone’s character in at first single-minded ways who struggles with his own reactions to her evolving behavior. “Poor Things” has a lot to say about a young, attractive woman figuring out a world that frequently seeks to control, minimize, or objectify, and if you think those seem like familiar concepts, you haven’t seen them like this.
Well, again, the movie does feel somewhat surgically assembled from Lanthimos’ previous films, even though, for a change, he didn’t write it. (Tony McNamara adapted the script from Alasdair Gray’s novel.) But like the others, you’ll want to think about and wrestle with it, and talk about it with whoever you can assuming you didn’t see it alone. Or in the event that you did after the person you came with left. Which they shouldn’t!
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