The Amazing Erotic Steampunk Adventures of Frankensex Lady

Poor Things is many things. A bonkers harangue served up as a picaresque journey of personal discovery. A sassy retort to Victorian propriety. A fuckable-Frankenstein fantasy with a happy ending for the monster. A feast of steampunk-goosed Art Nouveau imagery as reimagined by Dr. Seuss. Rich with sumptuous visuals, characters spouting zingers in go-for-baroque syntax, and straight-faced actors fully committed to lunatic behavior, Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest quasi-absurd fable is rarely dull.

POOR THINGS ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Yorgos Lanthimos
Written by: Tony McNamara
Starring: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, Jerrod Carmichael
Running time: 141 mins

But it does suffer from being a bit too smug about its woke sexual politics. Never breaking its male gaze, this you-go-girl story of a questing self—from youthful idiot to sex-worker sophisticate to independently wealthy matriarch—has the penumbra of mansplained feminism. It serves up dumbed-down insights about the perils of patriarchy.

Pygmalion vibes are strong as the hideously scarred and emotionally crippled surgeon Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) controls every aspect of simpleton ward Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a drowned pregnant Jane Doe he fished out of the Thames and rechristened as his own. Carving out the unborn baby’s brain and fancifully placing it into the mother’s cranium—with some revivifying lightning bolts thrown in for good measure—Baxter’s corpse-lady is reborn as a stiffed-limbed savant with the body of a 30-year-old and the mind of a 3-day-old. “What a very pretty retard,” declares Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), instantly smitten and politely misogynistic.

Shortening her master’s first name—with his encouragement, no doubt—Bella refers to Godwin as God as she wees in the hallway, smashes plates, spits out food and rides her high-wheeled tricycle around the doctor’s sprawling townhouse-cum-mortuary/lab. “Squish! Squish!” she squeals, repeatedly plunging a scalpel into a corpse’s eye sockets. Bella is all passion and impulse with no modulation, impetuous and bratty as she indulges her whims while a passively obliging Godwin watches.

His home is her sanctuary and prison, a gilded cage she can never leave without Godwin’s supervision. “She’s an experiment,” says Godwin. “I must control the conditions or else the results will not be pure.” To that end, he enlists adoring but mediocre med student McCandles, an otherwise genial and kind-hearted apprentice, to document Bella’s development. “Why you pen book every nut?” she asks him as he writes down her snacking consumption, speaking a beguilingly singular broken English.

But as her undeveloped mind grows, pubescent desires emerge. “Let us touch our genital pieces” she declares, eager to masturbate whether with an apple or a cucumber. Godwin decides she should wed and enlists a happily obliging McCandles to be her betrothed. But before the marriage is official, Godwin enlists rakish attorney Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, hilariously louche) to draw up legal papers that restrict Bella’s freedoms. “Must be such a woman to merit such bindings,” speculates Duncan, excusing himself from Godwin’s office to secretly track down Bella. “Bella not safe with you,” she declares after meeting him. He agrees with a grin. “You are absolutely not.”

So begins Bella’s epic adventure into the world, as Duncan takes her from London to Lisbon, then a cruise ship that docks in Alexandria, followed by destitution in Paris. Along the way, she satisfies her carnal urges—what she calls “furious jumping”—draining Duncan’s libido, going toe-to-toe with his self-satisfied but comparatively bourgeois sense of societal taboos, and embarrassing him with her raw disregard for norms. “I must go punch that baby,” she declares in a tony restaurant before he restrains her.

She breaks his will, drains his finances, and eventually drives him insane, all while discovering the blood and sugar that life offers. A geriatric matriarch (Fassbinder muse Hanna Schygulla, still entrancing) turns her on to Emerson and Goethe. Her bemused escort Harry Astley (a wry Jerrod Carmichael) exposes the world’s cruelty by showing her starving Egyptians and their dead babies. An extended stint earning her keep at a French brothel gives her financial agency for the first time in her life. And an 11^th-hour plot twist brings her back to London, only to detour into an unexpected previous life with a cruel military general (Christopher Abbott).

Lanthimos, never not thrillingly original, has carved out a place for himself as a full-time cinematic trickster and part-time moralist in wild rides like Dogtooth, The Lobster, and The Favourite. His films study human nature in all its petty, frustrated, longing desires with an ironic detachment but an ultimately sympathetic heart.

Yet, with the lovingly grotesque Poor Things, despite all the candy-colored wonder, all the fanciful splendor, all the wonderfully weird dialogue, all the wide-eyed imagery shot with fish-eye lenses, Poor Things is the first time Lanthimos’ storytelling seems so, frankly, basic. “You talk and you talk, until there is nothing left but to pull a gun,” yet another frustrated man says to Bella towards the end of the film. Or, to paraphrase another maddened man: the film wants to be a diabolical fuck-fest of a puzzle. But the only puzzlement is the film’s ultimate thematic simplicity.