Poor Things

I am a huge fan of Yorgos Lanthimos' work. Like many, I was first introduced to his films with the strange, awkward and irreverent The Lobster, and since then I've eagerly been awaiting each of his following films to see what he can come up with next. The Favourite, Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Poor Things are all great movies, and yet still nothing can beat The Lobster in my eyes.

Poor Things is based on a novel of the same name, though as far as I can tell the two are similar in name and basic premise alone. In the film, we follow Godwin Baxter, a disfigured Dr. Frankenstein of sorts who creates Bella Baxter by reanimating a corpse. He teaches Bella language, cognitive function, and more in his experiments, and she learns incredibly quickly, soon wanting to set out on her own adventure after being charmed by Mark Ruffalo's Duncan Wedderburn. What follows is an adventure of self-discovery filled with strange, enamouring twists on real-world locations, characters that challenge Bella's world view, caramel tarts and lots of graphic sex.

I mean a lot of sex, by the way. Best not to stick this on with your parents at Christmas, no matter how much reviewers speak about it being an uplifting tale of life. That's not to say the critics are wrong, by the way. Poor Things is full of hope about life, about people and their capacity to improve. Bella Baxter is pure, a blank slate that refuses to see the worst in people, even when they have proven time and time again they have no willingness to be better. She is child-like in that regard, and yet even as she matures throughout the film she never loses that willingness to do all she can to help people.

It's a character concept that could easily have become overbearing or annoying, but Emma Stone is simply transcendent as Bella Baxter. She manages to capture the infantile and the adult elements of this experiment come to life in an impossibly believable way. Effortlessly funny and heart-breaking in certain moments, she is an exceptional protagonist to this story. It's clear she's worked with Lanthimos before, as she easily works her way around the dialogue which can be awkward in the mouths of other actors. There's a certain delay to it, an almost intangible quality that you'll only notice when you stick something else on. It's clearer to notice in Lanthimos' other films, but it still is a welcome presence here.

Stone's supporting cast are largely on a par with her. Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, and a surprise Margaret Qualley each help flesh out this strange version of our own world with limited screen time in some cases. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the same warmth for Mark Ruffalo's performance. Ruffalo isn't bad here, not by any means, it's one of his best performances. Call it a personal ick if you will, but I just can't seem to get over the idea that Mark Ruffalo - similar to Dwayne Johnson and Will Smith - seems to be himself in every film. No matter his character, I don't imagine him as a completely different person. To me, he's usually just Mark Ruffalo playing a guy, which is quite immersion-breaking. It doesn't help that his British accent is pretty bad. There's an argument to be made that perhaps it's supposed to be that bad, but even when Ruffalo delivers some decent laughs, it irked me.

As I said at the start of this review, even though when I watched Poor Things I could see that it was Lanthimos' best work in terms of his cinematography, the story he's pieced together (minus some slowness at the start), and the performances he's brought out of these actors, but the same feeling wasn't there. As Lanthimos has grown more popular, in some ways he has become more daring but in others there's definitely the sense that this film was made for the wider appeal. Not the people who watch one MCU film a year but those who thought themselves a movie buff because they dared to watch Parasite with subtitles after it won the Oscar. That's not to gatekeep anything, it just feels like there's something pure and unabashed missing from Poor Things, which stopped it from being excellent to me. It is still great, and a worthy recommendation if you've not yet seen it, but the feeling wasn't there, at least for me, and I keep kicking myself wondering why.