In the Flesh: Poor Things

I think if this morning you’d asked me to sit down and watch a steampunk adaptation of Frankenstein where the monster was a hot girl and it ended with a happy polycule, I’d have told you where you could stick it. Having now seen Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, I can confidently say I’d have been dumb and wrong to turn you down. What a pure joy of a film this is, alive with curiosity and passion, buoyed by art direction and costuming somewhere between Eiko Ishioka and Jean Pierre Jeunet, scored like a confusing psychosexual nightmare in the key of Wes Anderson by composer Jerskin Fendrix. Mark Ruffalo gives one of the funniest supporting performances in recent memory as the smooth-talking rake Duncan Wedderburn, whose conquests, reputation, and sanity are dashed against the cliff face of Bella Baxter’s (Emma Stone) far greater disregard for social norms and lack of cultural conditioning. And Stone sells it. She really does. That whole living doll, am-I-human, journey to personhood thing you’ve seen a thousand times.

It’s also perhaps the first time I’ve found “child in an adult’s body” interesting, because the film’s approach not only accounts for the instinctive brutality of innocence but for the quandary, to the world around her, of an unconditioned mind with agency of its own. A woman-child who disregards the unexamined conventionality of the would-be rulebreakers around her, who shames others with both ignorance and insight, whose thoughtless selfishness is both deeply funny and thought-provoking. Lanthimos has none of the sexual squeamishness which so often plagues similar projects, and Poor Things is intimately concerned with bodies, with shame, with desire, with the commodification of sexuality, and with the architecture of relationships both explicit and unspoken. Set against a whimsical steampunk background, big questions like the nature of aging, the origins of abuse, and the horrors of poverty take on a dreamlike quality, a sense of hovering half-reality enhanced by Holly Waddington’s exquisite costumes, which morph and change in concert with Bella’s development into her own version of adulthood.

Willem Dafoe is wryly brilliant as Dr. Godwin Baxter, Bella’s creator and ersatz father, whose mixed feelings toward his own unimaginably abusive father inform both his failures and successes as a sort of parent. His voice cracks and creaks like an old branch. His face is a burned and cratered wasteland of scar tissue. He is Frankenstein and monster both, lessons already learned in his own imperfect way, still prone to folly and failure but able to embrace his creation in a way he himself longed to be embraced as a child, and to let that creation go. Poor Things is an extraordinary film, a new high water mark for a subgenre long left stagnant and uninspired. Lanthimos’ penchant for fisheye distortions of his painterly compositions has never played better than it does here, literalizing the blinkered and distorted perspectives of his characters and of the world around them. A gift for lovers of cinema everywhere.