Stone gives a hilarious, beyond-next-level performance as Bella Baxter, the experimental subject of a troubled Victorian anatomist, in Lanthimos’s toweringly bizarre comedy
That cooing note of kindness and pity in the title is misleading – in fact, there is pure vivisectional ruthlessness in this toweringly bizarre epic. Poor Things is a steampunk-retrofuturist Victorian freakout and macabre black-comic horror, adapted by screenwriter Tony McNamara from the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray and directed by the absurdist virtuoso Yorgos Lanthimos. Lanthimos shows us an extraordinary, artificial, contorted world, partly shot in monochrome, sometimes bulging out at us through a fish-eye lens, elsewhere lit from within in richly saturated tones, like an engraved colour plate.
And his leading lady is someone who takes it to the next career level, or the level beyond the next level: Emma Stone. She gives an amazing and hilarious performance as the sexual-innocent primitive Bella Baxter, the secret experimental subject and ward of charismatic, troubled anatomist Dr Godwin Baxter (whom she calls “God”), played by Willem Dafoe. Bella’s beady gaze under a near-monobrow takes everything in, while she makes what sense she can from the brave new world with which Dr Baxter has surrounded her.
Bella is a young woman who had attempted to take her own life by throwing herself from London’s Tower Bridge. Baxter daringly has her body retrieved under cover of darkness from the Thames’s muddy bank and – like a cross between Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein and Shaw’s Henry Higgins – reanimates her using methods whose exotic ghastliness is only revealed at the story’s end.
Childlike and yet adult-bodied and increasingly excited by her discovery of masturbation – which in turn stimulates her language skills beyond infantile pidgin English – Bella is a shocking and beguiling figure. She is tutored and looked after by Dr Baxter, his housekeeper Mrs Prim (a great turn from Vicky Pepperdine) and Baxter’s fresh-faced research assistant Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), who falls deeply in love with Bella. Baxter permits Max to propose to his young pupil on condition that the married couple continue to live with him in his colossally intricate townhouse.
But disaster beckons when the solicitor who arrives with the documents formalising this arrangement turns out to be a bounder and a cad; he seduces Bella and takes her away with him on a grand European tour of sensual indulgence and adventure, and Dr Baxter fatalistically concludes he has no choice but to let Bella go. This wicked fellow is one Duncan Wedderburn – an outrageously funny performance from Mark Ruffalo, whose entire face is transformed into fleshy naughtiness by adding a moustache and, in one scene, a straw boater.
This film comes to us from an elite group of talent, including cinematographer Robbie Ryan and production designers James Price and Shona Heath, with an insinuatingly strange musical score by Jerskin Fendrix. Everything in it – every frame, every image, every joke, every performance – gets a gasp of excitement.
Emerging from the economic turbulence of 2000s Greece, Yorgos Lanthimos spearheaded a cinematic movement defined by stilted dialogue, alienated characters, and bizarre social rituals.
His films function as behavioral experiments—placing humans in hermetically sealed environments (a house, a hotel, a palace) to test the limits of control, language, and love.
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and written by Tony McNamara, Poor Things is a surrealist science-fiction black comedy based on the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray. It is a bold, visually striking reimagining of the Frankenstein myth, focusing on the radical self-actualization of a woman named Bella Baxter.
The Resurrection
Set in a retro-futuristic Victorian London, the story begins with Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a brilliant but scarred surgeon, discovering the body of a pregnant woman who died by suicide. In a macabre experiment, Baxter transplants the brain of her unborn fetus into her body and brings her back to life. He names her Bella (Emma Stone).
The Awakening
Bella begins with the mental capacity of an infant in an adult body. Under the watchful eye of Godwin (whom she calls "God") and his assistant Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), her vocabulary and coordination improve at an accelerated rate. As she hits a "teenage" phase of rebellion and sexual curiosity, she becomes restless.
The Odyssey
Despite Godwin's plan for her to marry Max, Bella runs away with the debauched lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) on a whirlwind tour of Lisbon, Alexandria, and Paris.
Lisbon: She discovers sensory pleasures, music, and the "furious jumping" of sex.
Alexandria: She is confronted with the stark reality of human suffering and poverty, which shatters her innocence and introduces her to philosophy and empathy.
Paris: After Duncan runs out of money and loses his mind to jealousy, Bella enters a brothel to support herself, where she learns about socialism, medicine, and the complexities of human desire.
The Choice
Bella eventually returns to London to be with the dying Godwin. Her wedding to Max is interrupted by General Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), the cruel husband of her "previous life" (Victoria). Bella chooses to go with him to understand her past but discovers his sadistic nature. In a final act of agency, she outwits him and returns to Godwin’s home, now a fully autonomous woman pursuing a medical degree.
Visual Evolution
The film utilizes a specific visual language to mirror Bella's growth:
Color Palette: The film starts in stark black-and-white (Bella's infancy). As she reaches Lisbon and experiences sensory overload, the world explodes into a "technicolor" dreamscape with impossible skies and neon architecture.
Lenses: The frequent use of ultra-wide "fish-eye" lenses creates a sense of voyeurism and disorientation, as if we are peering into a laboratory slide.
Costume Design (Holly Waddington)
Bella's clothes are purposefully "wrong" for the era. Early on, she wears bloomers with large, puffy sleeves—resembling a child playing dress-up. In Paris, her attire becomes more structured and utilitarian, signaling her transition into a professional and intellectual role.
Critical Reception & Awards
Poor Things was one of the most acclaimed films of 2023, praised for its "steampunk-rococo" aesthetic and Stone's fearless performance.
Major Awards
Academy Awards (96th): Won 4 Oscars, including Best Actress (Emma Stone), Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, and Best Makeup and Hairstyling.
Golden Globes: Won Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and Best Actress.
Venice Film Festival: Won the prestigious Golden Lion (Best Film).
Dogtooth (2009)
A scarily ingrown family are at the heart of this brilliant Greek black comedy, with a hint of Michael Haneke
A black-comic poem of dysfunction, a veritable operetta of self-harm, this brilliant and bizarre film from the Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos is superbly acted and icily controlled – it grips from the very first scenes. Development does not get more arrested than this. Dogtooth could be read as a superlative example of absurdist cinema, or possibly something entirely the reverse – a clinically, unsparingly intimate piece of psychological realism. Watching this, and alternately gaping at the unselfconsciously shocking scenes of violence, thwarted sexuality and unexpressed sibling grief, I was reminded of Alan Bennett's maxim that all families have a secret: they are not like other families. But I can't imagine any family being quite as unlike others as this.
Somewhere in the Greek countryside, a wealthy middle-aged businessman and paterfamilias (played by Christos Stergioglou) has a handsome house with beautiful grounds and a gorgeous swimming pool – the upkeep of which this family appears to manage without external help. He has a quietly submissive wife (Michelle Valley), and three handsome children in their 20s: two daughters and one son, played by Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni and Hristos Passalis. So far, so wholesome.
But something is very wrong with this picture. The children, as becomes chillingly clear, are infantilised: they have never been permitted to leave the family compound, and, like Baron von Trapp's children responding to a naval whistle, they have been trained in obedience like dogs, woofing and leaping about on all fours to order, but also capable of walking and talking like convincing human beings, although their conversation has a stilted quality, as if in a light, hypnosis-induced trance.
Their education has been a parody of home-schooling in which mum and dad have deliberately taught them the wrong meaning of words, perhaps to shield them from outside reality, to render this reality meaningless and unreadable, and therefore to blur and jumble its very existence. This grotesque anti-teaching is a symptom of their parents' own shock and trauma, an alienation they have fanatically passed on to their offspring. The father pays his factory's security guard, Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou), to come to the house (blindfolded) and service the son sexually, an arrangement he furiously terminates on learning that Christina is a bad influence on his daughters, before deciding that the arrangement can be carried on, as it were, in-house.
The key to the mystery may reside in a missing family member and a doberman that the master of the house has evidently, paradoxically, decided to have trained by a professional outside the family group.
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