January 25, 2024 | ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT | By Charlotte Maley
Content warning and light spoilers included
I had not a clue I was about the to watch the greatest film ever made, at least during my lifetime, when I walked into my small hometown theater in early January. Yet, I had a peculiar feeling that something incredible was about to happen. Whether it was Emma Stone’s eyes, which miraculously stared back at everyone in the theater, or in the very title itself, I cannot say.
What I can say is that on an otherwise mundane and cloudy Tuesday afternoon, I saw the most innovative artistic work ever created on the absurdities of patriarchy, social order and what it means to transgress upon them. Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Poor Things” is not only wildly entertaining and satisfyingly disgusting, but a philosophical work that is sure to beat the test of time, and I cannot give this utterly bizarre film higher praises.
In the beginning of the movie, an audience is met with a parade of blue objects and scenery; an obviously painted stormy sky, a hyper realistic view of wild river waters and most strikingly, a raven-haired woman, Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone. Dressed in a royal blue dress, she throws herself from the bridge she stands upon. This won’t be the last time the audience sees her. Her body would be retrieved from the canal by a deformed surgeon, played by Willem Dafoe, who resurrects her from the dead. However, she would not quite be the same person that jumped from that bridge, for this surgeon replaces her brain with that of a newborn baby’s. From here, an epic tale begins.
“Poor Things” is the retelling of a 1992 novel by Scottish author Alasdair Gray, which was already a loose adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 work “Frankenstein.”
Baxter has a woman’s body and infant’s mind, providing an interesting opportunity for us to watch as she matures and gets acquainted with a bizarre, socially divided world. As she is radically introduced to a culture that objectifies and tries to control her, we watch as this woman, who has none of the social conditioning to accept any of the imposed rules at face-value, proves them to be both illogical and unnecessary.
Each stage of her life is not only marked by simple developmental changes, such as her apprehension of language and increasing ability to follow fine-motor control related directions, but by the men that she meets along the way and their different intentions as they desire to possess her. Each man that Baxter comes across has different reasons for loving her, but throughout the film, she unapologetically emasculates and proves wrong the different people who try to degrade or commodify her, speaking volumes to the ridiculous ideas of female inferiority in our contemporary world.
There is so much more going on in the plot that I couldn’t possibly do justice to in this review but believe me when I say that this film is a social critique jam-packed full of nuance and over dramatic but spot-on metaphor. Baxter experiences the full range of men that most women must come across throughout their lifetime, and she does so within an undisclosed, but obviously very short, timeframe. While outlining the absurdities and sure complexity of a woman’s life in relation to the patriarchy, the film also displays how uniformed and describable such an evolution is, revealing that there is an exact science to the societally imposed construction of feminine existence.
Although I praise this movie for its intelligence, it is admittedly most special for its unmatched depravity, sickness, and uncomfortable humor. Not only is the viewer met with gruesome images of mutilated bodies, otherworldly objects, and off-putting pornographic depictions, but the very subjects that it covers are wildly taboo as well. For instance, the in-depth sexual exploration of a woman who has the mind of a child is an uncomfortable allusion to pedophilia, and it certainly made people stir in their seats more than any gross bodily function displayed on the screen.
Even though Baxter’s mental age certainly gives opportunity for deranged plot points, it also provides ample entertainment. Not knowing any better, Baxter throws up in public and walks away as if nothing happened, spit out food that she doesn’t enjoy right onto the table, and tries to punch a baby that makes loud noises. Additionally, the cartoonishly embellished portrayals of the male archetypes that she comes across also provides for unhindered laughs, making this film fun on top of being a clear masterpiece.
The cherry on top of the intelligence and unprecedented nastiness of “Poor Things” is undoubtedly its aesthetic creativity. It is an eccentric compilation of aesthetics, from gothic, black-and-white, steampunk-style oddness of 19th century London, to colorful, fairytale, Toyland depictions of Portugal.
There is simply no describable rhyme or reason to the vast array of landscape decor, and I can only describe the style as a masterful combination of Tim Burton, Guillermo del Toro, and Wes Anderson cinematographic trademarks, all the while managing to be far more off-putting than anything those other creators ever made. There is no shortage of new, strange, and perplexing artistic choices in the film that keep the viewer in a constant state of confusion, thinking, and subsequent realization of its genius. As one of the strangest movies I’ve seen, “Poor Things” is sure to be a benchmark for gothic, Victorian-style fantasy that all else will be judged against for a long time.
As I left that theater, after a bizarre ending, I heard a man say to his friend that this film was the most “fucked up thing that [he’s] ever seen.”
I watched the movie with my rather conservative mother, who was not the same for a long time afterwards, and neither was I, but for a very different reason. It was not the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen, nor the smartest, but certainly the first that I thought may be equally impressive when measured with both scales, and for that it made it into my personal top three movies of all time. It warranted every Golden Globe and will be worthy of every Oscar that it wins. If you see only one of the nominees this year, let it be “Poor Things.”