There have been a lot of great movie characters in 2023 – from the brilliantly realised real-life figures in Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon to the wackadoo assassins of John Wick 4 and Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning – but none have been as purely fun to hang out with as Poor Things’s Bella Baxter. As brought to life by Emma Stone, Bella is a creature of pure anarchic joy, the rapidly beating heart around which Yorgos Lanthimos’s completely wonderful adaptation of Alasdair Grey’s Frankenstein-meets-Lady Chatterley’s Lover novel is built.
Bella starts her life as an experiment in the turn-of-the-century laboratory of creator/father-figure Godwin, aka God (Willem Dafoe), who plucks a freshly dead adult woman’s body from the Thames and puts an infant brain in there, creating, essentially, a 30-year-old who was literally born yesterday. It’s the first of many genuinely transgressive ideas at play here, and soon followed by an equally fearless central thesis – that sex and pleasure, both explicitly portrayed without shame or apology constantly, are the ultimate purposes of life. Upon her discovery of orgasms, Bella’s progress starts accelerating rapidly, suddenly exponentially increasing both her vocabulary and cognitive faculties, and soon she’s on a raunchy world tour with rakish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo).
Bella’s trip through world cities like Lisbon, Paris, and Alexandria is an absolute blast, hyper-energetic and very funny – there are loads of proper, laugh-out-loud jokes to be found. All alumni of The Favourite,Stone, Lanthimos, and writer Tony McNamara prove a dream team in bringing this story to life, Stone’s magnificent and transfixing performance growing and changing as Bella swiftly learns and absorbs new words and ideas – her unique way of constructing sentences is a truly remarkable feat of writing. Stone has never been a predictable actor, shifting from broad comedy to prestige drama to superhero tentpoles with ease, but Poor Things marks truly fearless new territory for her, and she embraces it with a manic and infectious passion, easily one of the best performances of the year.
Almost matching her is Ruffalo, who is simply hilarious as Duncan. Boasting a silly accent and flamboyant sensibilities, he’s a riot whenever he’s on screen, wringing a laugh out of every line. Dafoe, as well as Ramy Youssef as the sensitive Doctor McCandles who finds himself falling in a more chaste form of love with Bella, plays things straighter even through some monstrous prosthetics, and brings a sense of absurdist tragedy to the whole thing. A late-in-the-film conversation between God and Bella is genuinely moving, a remarkable achievement given how surreal and funny everything beforehand has been.
Lanthimos has always traded in the bizarre, but he’s been given his freest reign yet to do so here. All his typical stylistic trademarks, as shot by Robbie Ryan, are present and accounted for and in his adapting of Grey’s late-Victorian sci-fi world he finds whole new ways to make the world look (and, with Jerskin Fendrix’s immaculate score, sound) alien. Poor Things is a technicolour steampunk fantasia, frames dripping with garish purples or yellows while immaculate set, costume, prop, and creature (see: all the animals in God’s house that have had their heads and bodies switched around) design makes for a constantly unpredictable visual marvel.
Hilarious, hyperactive, and with a deep love and respect for its central character – it’s touching to see Bella change every time she spends time with a significant new person, assimilating something about them for good and ill – it’s hard to think of any way that Poor Things could be a more fun night out at the movies. Throughout this story, everyone who meets Bella Baxter is, in one way or another, completely enchanted and, by the end of Poor Things, so too will you.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 