Poor Things

Despite her grotesque unruliness, Max wants to marry Bella, who seems to acquiesce largely out of ignorance. Max’s maneuvers are intercepted, however, by one Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a lawyer and charmingly sleazy lothario who introduces Bella to the pleasures of the flesh and whisks her away on a hedonistic holiday that starts in Lisbon before moving onto more distant lands, though all of them look basically the same as rendered through The Favourite DP Robbie Ryan’s giddy deployment of convex lenses, a dense frosting of digital effects, and the children’s-book production designs of Shona Heath and James Price. Poor Things is Lanthimos at his most baroque by a very wide margin, embracing a relentlessly fanciful and fantastical aesthetic more in keeping with Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton than, say, Michael Haneke or Ulrich Seidl. There is a sameness—no doubt intentional—to this 141-minute film’s constant parade of eye candy. Some will find it delightful. I found it exhausting. Though every possible accolade should be showered upon costume designer Holly Waddington (Lady Macbeth), who robes Bella in a wildly playful array of outsized upperwear and bizarrely mismatching short pants that mirror the character’s intellectual and moral progress in a series of varying color schemes and silhouettes. Along with Stone’s delicately graded, highly disciplined, comedically graceful performance, Bella’s outfits are the most distinctive, thoughtful, furiously creative aspects of the film.

While Poor Things begins as something adjacent to horror—there’s no shortage of shock and disgust in the first act—as Bella’s odyssey chugs along, incorporating lessons in psychology, social ethics, and gender politics, the film’s tone becomes less audacious and more expository, even polemical. The peculiar paradox of Poor Things is that the more it delivers ostensibly perverse ideas and images, the more cutesy and domesticated it becomes. The film will find great success and Lanthimos will find only more opportunities to direct. But after the string of increasingly big-budget affairs that he’s helmed since parting ways with the Greek film industry, I’d welcome a poorer realization of his vision.