"Poor Things"

  ☆☆☆☆☆ 

Yorgos Lanthimos gives his audience no opportunity to settle in to Poor Things, which confuses and assaults from the moment the opening credits appear. This is not a film or a filmmaker who wants to take things slow and steady, and that's for the best, because if there were a minute to really consider what's on screen, the whole movie might collapse.

But it doesn't. Instead, it moves at its own crazed pace and dares the audience to keep up, and by the time the film and the audience are in synch (it did, I admit, take me quite a few minutes), Poor Things has worked its spell.

The movie takes place in the late 1800s, opening in Victorian England on a truly mad scientist who has shocking ideas. Well, maybe not so shocking, because they aren't too far removed from the general outline of the story of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. But what if the monster wasn't attacked and killed by outraged villagers, didn't have that flat head and those neck bolts, and learned at an advanced pace? And what if that so-called monster looked less like Boris Karloff and more like Emma Stone?

To give the broadest outline of Poor Things is to imply this is a horror film, or a science-fiction parable, or some demented satire, and all of those things are undeniably true. But Poor Things begins much in the same way, coincidentally, as Barbie, with the created woman treated merely as, well, some poor thing, and all the men around her laying one claim or another to her brain, her body, or both.

The name given to this fabulous creation is Bella Baxter, and it isn't long before she becomes the subject of legal wrangling and is swept off her unsteady, ungainly feet by a lustful lawyer who wants her for only one thing—the same thing they all want: her body. Bella, meanwhile, is starting to get an idea that she might crave adventure. That she might want something ... more.

Trying to condense the narrative plot points in Poor Things into a few lines is impossible, and the last paragraph is only the first 30 minutes or so of a wholly unexpected adventure, entirely disarming, frequently grotesque, often shocking in its graphic and matter-of-fact displays of both body functions and, above all, sex. Lots and lots and lots of sex.

This isn't a movie for prudes, but even the most prudish will have to admit they see something of themselves in the story of Bella's awakening to life and its complexities. As she journeys into Europe, her unpredictable experiences recall something of Voltaire's Candide and John Irving's Garp. Yet Poor Things is grandly, defiantly singular. This isn't like any movie you've known, and its blunt observations of humanity and the things "polite society" doesn't usually talk about (but we do, in our minds, in our hearts, in our darkened bedrooms or less savory locales) might land cinematic body blows on uptight audiences who aren't prepared.

Consider that a warning, a challenge and a delighted, full-throated recommendation: Poor Things is a marvel, a challenge, and a gloriously unprecedented bit of creation.

Viewed December 18, 2023 — AMC Topanga

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