Poor Things–The Lucky Devils
Poor Things, starring Emma Stone in her 2024 Academy Award-winning role, is a feminist Frankenstein-like tale based upon Alasdair’s 1992 eponymous novel.
Opening with emotionally and physically scarred mad scientist Godwin (“God”) Baxter (Willem Defoe) admiring his creation, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) on the operating table, we know immediately that God’s sinister surgery has produced a freak. He has given the gift of life back to Bella (ironically, “the beautiful”), now reborn after she jumped off the London Bridge. Pregnant before committing suicide, Bella’s fetus has been harvested in order to bring her back to life. Now both mother and daughter are encased in her physical body.
Essentially lobotomized, Bella has no memories. She is a fetal brain in a young woman’s sensuous form. Under God’s guardianship, she develops from a toddler learning to walk and talk into a young woman slowly realizing her sexuality. God’s lab assistant Max (Ramy Youssef) falls in love with the innocent and intellectually curious Bella. Duncan (Mark Ruffalo), God’s lawyer, is tasked with chaperoning Bella on a journey around the world. He attempts to tame her evolving sexual awareness and desire for gratification, while providing education on becoming an adult.
As Bella becomes more independent, Duncan becomes more autocratic and threatened. Poor Things slowly moves in the direction of a darker, profoundly inhumane world. Soon Bella is open to all forms of experimentation, including exploring socialism, the underbelly of capitalism, and female exploitation. Money and subjugation become closely aligned, malignant, and disturbing. One of Bella’s more startling realizations: “In order to become whole, you need to degrade yourself? Why?”
The acting is brilliant from an almost perfect casting. Willem Defoe’s character as God, a disfigured scientist still damaged from an unimaginably abusive childhood yearning for love is rendered inconsolable. Mark Ruffalo as Duncan, exemplifies the “poor thing”, the toxic male pretending to be a supportive ally. Both Defoe and Ruffalo stun with their wide range of emotions evoking sympathy and intense disgust. Ramy Youssef as a potential male partner who truly sees women, without erasure or disdain, personifies the non-toxic masculine soulmate Bella is searching for. And Emma Stone is miraculous: unhinged, her body sometimes almost catatonic. She is absolutely fearless in exploring erotic physicality and both cognitive enlightenment and bewilderment.
Poor Things is provocative, unnerving and brutally macabre à la Disney in a nightmare fantasia of a tale. This pioneering, idiosyncratic film is certainly not for everyone. At times overtly erotic and humorous, in Dali-esque setting and Alice-in-Wonderland costuming, Poor Things displays a surreal dreamscape, occupying a liminal space between sensuous and pornographic.
Contributing to the pantheon of movies that should be appreciated for the transgressive experiments that they are, Poor Things steps into the territory of the theater of the absurd.
Availability: Netflix