I’ve frequently described the films of Yorgos Lanthimos as experiments, so it’s fitting that much of Poor Things, his latest, takes place in a lab.
Specifically, the laboratory of Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a Victorian-era surgeon whose grotesquely scarred face suggests he’s been the recipient of plenty of surgery of his own. Given to mucking about with corpses, Baxter’s current project is Bella (Emma Stone), a recently deceased socialite whom Baxter has brought back to life, Frankenstein-style. In Baxter’s plain words: “She’s an experiment.”
As all Lanthimos films are the same—controlled, high-concept scenarios meant to bizarrely test the human condition in some way—I tend to judge them by their results. His enterprises have produced brilliant black comedies meditating on the likes of authoritarianism (Dogtooth) and marriage (The Lobster). Other exercises (Alps, The Killing of a Sacred Deer) have proven inconclusive. His last film, The Favourite, performed an amusing nip and tuck on the prestige costume drama, one that ended up earning the sort of polite industry attention that far more proper costume dramas have historically received: 10 Oscar nominations and one win, for Olivia Colman as Best Actress.
With the clout he earned from that success, Lanthimos turned to a 1992 novel from Scottish author Alasdair Gray and indulged in whatever macabre whims and darkly comic impulses the source material inspired. (The adapted screenplay is by Tony McNamara.) Stone, an Oscar nominee for her supporting turn in The Favourite and both star and a producer here, is similarly unrestrained. Poor Things is a work of pure artistic expression, free from any commercial concerns, in which an actor gleefully smashes (even more so than in The Favourite) any preconceived notions of her persona, all while supported by direction, costume design, art direction, and production design that is similarly unfettered. It’s a signature achievement and utterly exhausting.
I hung in as long as I could, dazzled for a time by the elaborate artistry on display. I’m a sucker for any movie riffing on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, let alone one that also pays visual homage to the crackling electricity of James Whale’s interpretations of the tale: 1931’s Frankenstein and 1935’s The Bride of Frankenstein. Although significant portions of Poor Things is in black and white, Lanthimos wisely creates some space from Whale’s films by depicting Bella’s re-animation sequence in lurid color. Outside of the lab, Poor Things’ Victorian era seems stitched together from Hayao Miyazaki sketches and leftover Willy Wonka sets, with magical, purplish skies that are dotted with dreamily inventive vehicles. Among the many steampunk details is Baxter’s carriage, which runs on some sort of mechanical device yet still features the head of an actual horse fixed to the front. Meanwhile, the surrealist, black-and-white, undulating tableaus that separate the film’s various sections—with Bella at the center—are standalone works of art that I wish I could have stared at longer.
Such astonishments, however, don’t feel additive to the experience of Poor Things; rather, they offer something more like relief from the assault of aggressive strangeness that mostly defines the movie, turning it into a wearying, repetitive experience. The fish-eye lens that was occasionally used in The Favourite is far more frequently employed here, so much so that its likely purpose—to convey a sense of discombobulation, perhaps specifically Bella’s—becomes dulled. As for the circular, peephole aspect ratio that Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan frequently employ, I couldn’t trace its reason for existence (often it captures a moment of stress or violence, but not always). Meanwhile, the music, by Jerskin Fendrix, consists of plinks and plunks and screeches and blurts, which only add to the onslaught.
Stone’s performance operates in the same register, from the random acts of violence Bella commits when she is still a subject in the lab to the copious sexual exploits she engages in when she sets out to see the world. It all feels driven by a desire to perform outrageousness, rather than to explore Bella as a character. I guess the sex makes sense, as Bella investigates what it means to have a body, but I never understood why she was instinctively violent.
Meaning can certainly be mapped onto Poor Things. Considering the men in Bella’s world—from Willem Dafoe’s paternally flummoxed Baxter to the jet-setting cad (Mark Ruffalo, quite funny) who steals her away to be his arm candy to the husband (Christopher Abbott) who eventually shows up to reclaim her—the movie lampoons men who are baffled by a woman doing whatever she wants whenever she wants, society be damned. And as an ornately imagined meditation on what it means to be alive, it’s something like a gender-swapped version of Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, with a far more assertive central figure. As an experiment, then, I can’t say it’s a failure. But I’m certainly not eager to watch Lanthimos conduct it a second time.
(12/9/2023)
