To be reborn. Freed from the chains that bind us, permitted at last to exist anew, to reinvent, to reform, to become someone with boundless curiosity, to wield fierce determination, to steadfastly refuse to be put in a box. Drowned by the furious rapids of polite society, eroded by expectations, shattered by the crushing structure of constructed morality. Life would be better, perhaps, if we just ignored these suffocating regressive structures and became, unapologetically, the person we want to become. If we were all able to simply and joyously experience every whim at will, would the world be a better place, or would it merely spiral into mindless anarchy?
This is the central conceit of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, a vibrantly woven bubblegum gothpunk fairy tale about a newborn adult. Brought to life by bizarro mad scientist Godwin (Willem Dafoe, a pitch-perfect transcendent oddity), the beautiful Bella Baxter (Emma Stone, who truly embodies the film’s heart and soul with a stunning and revelatory performance) is born with a new mind in a woman’s body. She stumbles around Godwin’s ostentatious estate like an unbalanced toddler, babbling incoherently as she discovers the world for the first time. Developing at an extremely accelerated rate, a new Bella emerges each day, rapidly becoming more aware and intelligent. Her curiosities evolve beyond anyone’s ability to instruct her of societal constructs, jumping fearlessly into new experiences without regard for how anyone else may perceive her.
For Bella, life without boundaries is pure bliss. As she mercurially shifts from impressionable naivety to full of voracious desire, the world becomes a playground of fascination and novelty. The men in her periphery attempt to take advantage of her innocence but without the pressures of normalized misogyny and the ingrained expectations of patriarchal structure she does not understand why she should be asked to do anything she is not expressly interested in doing. Instead, her unwavering independence is like a flame of burning intensity attracting foolish moths, who desire nothing more than to be burned within her consumptive orbit. Max (Ramy Youssef), a student of Godwin’s, becomes quickly infatuated after being tasked with studying her learning and experience. Duncan (Mark Ruffalo), Godwin’s lawyer and an independently wealthy bachelor, also becomes hopelessly enraptured, whisking Bella away on a globetrotting adventure where she experiences mankind’s endless rabbit hole of contradictions.
To Duncan, Bella is an object of desire, beautiful and mysterious, to be controlled by the fear of isolation and the promise of wealth. To Bella, who exists without any perception of ulterior motive or sinister oppression, Duncan is just another part of the discovery of existence, representative of a sexual awakening and the liberation of pleasure. Refusing to submit to any notion of ownership, she stays steadfastly independent, wandering the streets on a whim in search of orgasmic revelation, in awe of the beauty of life. It is a world of aesthetic explosion, from the copper and cobblestone steampunk streets of London to the melted candy sunsets of Paris, the baroque nautical designs of an extravagant cruise ship, and the dusty haze of Athens. Designed with hyperreal stylization and strange beauty, Robbie Ryan’s sweeping cinematography becomes an extension of Bella’s curiosity, with sumptuous framing and dizzying fisheyes, every beautiful idiosyncrasy of human existence is highlighted with stunning visualization.
Poor Things is a spellbinding rollercoaster, a mesmeric journey through time and space, defining, exaggerating, and mystifying the thousands of messy emotions we wrestle with daily through the lens of inverting every false construct and dismantling our destructive cynicism. Some of us still see life’s beauty, some of us nihilistically believe everything is a deterministic tumble toward violent death. Some believe in honesty and true emotion and the ideal image of love and still stumble and make mistakes. Autonomy and liberation shatter oppression and expectation, seek to seize control of that which has been weaponized against you, and forge a path only you could forge. Beneath the film’s acerbic, deadpan wit and freewheeling hedonistic approach to wanton sexual desire, is a core philosophy that our contradictions and imperfections make us whole. Self-actualization and acceptance must also come with a rejection of that which threatens to stifle our innately human desires.
As always, Lanthimos crafts a world of melted uncanny reality, a hazy psychedelia of past ideation and bold new cinematic motions. Wields the subversive austerity of The Favourite (2018) with glee as it whips a Christopher Doyle fisheye through its stately sets while affecting the impenetrably strange reality of The Lobster (2015) through a retrofuturist/steampunk mashup aesthetic that’s as gorgeous as it is fascinating to piece together. The result is a profoundly weird cinematic texture, but presented so boldly through lavish production design and stunning costume work that it feels like an endless revelation, a completely new stylistic endeavor that shows influence in its periphery while remaining impossibly singular. Importantly, its determined strangeness gives way to one of the most shockingly hilarious scripts on screen all year, a kaleidoscope of affect and wordplay and the clashing of ideology resulting in explosively awkward silence or pointed, flat delivery. Stone and Ruffalo are dynamically engaging beyond all expectation, a spiraling evolution of relationship constantly giving way to revelations of independence and autonomy against stifling preexisting structure and the suffering of tradition.
Poor Things is cinema at its finest and most endearing, a vibrantly expressive reminder of originality and creativity couched within a lens of lust and comedy – perhaps what Lanthimos considers our most primal states of being. It is wacky and inventive and fascinating, constantly reforming into something new you didn’t think it could be, exploring and leveraging genre tropes while in a mode of endless subversion, floating on a cotton candy cloud of every little design choice that crafts this lavish landscape. It is a lot of things, but most importantly, it is deeply and wholly human. How easily we lose sight of ourselves. Maybe there’s room for all of us to become new again.