Are you familiar with the films of Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos? Movies such as Dogtooth (2009), Attenberg (2010), Alps (2011), The Lobster (2015), The Killing of the Scared Deer (2017), The Favourite (2018), Nimic (2019)? I’ve watched all these movies except one (The Favourite, on my to-watch list). His films are quirky, entertaining, off the beaten track, genre-defying, sometimes shocking, and always absorbing, but nothing could have prepared me for his latest offering – Poor Things (2023). Starring Willem Dafoe, Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Ramy Youssef, and various other seasoned actors of repute, the story is relatively straightforward. The movie opens in Victorian London with the jumping-off-a-high-bridge suicide of a young pregnant woman. Her body is recovered and sent to an acclaimed surgeon, Godwin ‘God’ Baxter (Defoe), who discovers that although the woman is, indeed, dead, her unborn baby is not. With skills that echo those of Victor Frankenstein, ‘God’ Baxter extracts the still-alive brain of the foetus and uses it to replace the dead brain of the woman. He brings the woman back to life and names her Bella Baxter (Stone). The stage is set to chart the development of an adult woman with a developing baby’s brain managing the growth of her physical needs and mental faculties unhindered by the social mores of the society she grows up in.

Poor Things: ‘God’ and ‘baby’ Bella, bedtime story

To say more would cause me to reveal too many spoilers, but as I watched the 2hr 20min film, memories of the development of Anne Golon’s sexually liberated heroine, Angélique, in the racy 1950s-80s historical adventure books came to mind, along with exotic location scenes from the 1956 movie, Around the World in Eighty Days, plus, of course, the classic film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein (1994). But Poor Things is no lightweight merging of sexual development, exotic locations, monstrous creations, and exciting adventures. The movie is far more than that and, be warned, very explicit in places, both sexually (but not pornographic) and in language. Bella quickly learns to use extreme swear words, mostly from her first lover, Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo, playing the cad to the hilt), but the development of language tempers her descriptions of sexual activities as her brain matures: sexual intercourse is ‘furious jumping’, cunnilingus is ‘tongue play’ or ‘fast licking that leaves me yelping happily’, fellatio is ‘clever mouth’, foreplay is ‘warm up’, and a brothel is a ‘musty-smelling establishment of fornication’.

Poor Things: Willen Defoe as ‘God’

Everything about this film shrieks class, style and elegance – the sets, the costumes, the cinematography and screenplay, the music, the makeup (mainly Defoe’s) – but it is not for the faint-hearted. Billed as a stylish off-beat comedy, the dialogue is peppered with a liberal use of the F-word and, less frequently, the C-word. Male and female nudity, top and bottom, front and rear, is abundant. Themes of sexual liberation, female emancipation, prostitution, and socialism versus capitalism are explored, and accepted norms of Victorian social behaviour are blatantly disregarded by Bella. The movie cost $35M to make and has paid for itself at the box office by at least three times the budget. Poor Things is a tour-de-force for actress Emma Stone and a long way ahead of her breakthrough role as an is-she-or-isn’t-she-a-virgin? in the teen sex comedy Easy A (2010), and subsequently in critically acclaimed films such as La La Land (2016). Look out for Emma Stone’s hilarious dance routine with Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things, starting around 00:55. You are unlikely to see such a routine on the television show Strictly Come Dancing.

Poor Things: Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) and Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), dance scene

The movie has been nominated for eleven awards in the upcoming 96^th Academy Awards, to be held in Hollywood on March 10^th. At the time of posting, the movie is still on circuit release in theatres and is available to rent or purchase on Amazon Prime and Apple TV. It will become available on the streaming service Hulu on March 7^th. Catch it if you have a mind to do so.

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