“Poor Things” is a fascinating portrait of self-discovery

• Poor Things
• Directed by: Yorgos Lanthimos
• Starring: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef
• Comedy/Drama/Romance | R | 2 hr 21 min

By Reed Ripley

Coming-of-age stories are almost always set literally in coming-of-age stages of life (think middle school, high school, maybe even stretching into college-age), for good reason. Those are the times in life we collectively remember coming into our own as fully formed human beings, emotionally, mentally, and physically. Poor Things asks, what if someone were unwittingly dropped into that development, all at once, in a young adult’s body, and that question produces a fascinating portrait of self-discovery. 

That framing (young kid in an adult body) has been done before, but never like this. In films like Big and 13 Going on 30, there’s a retained sense of innocence, even as the kid-turned-adult protagonist realizes being an adult isn’t as great as it looks. And of course, in those films, the kids stay kids internally and eventually return to their youthful forms, ready to properly grow up with renewed perspective. 

Poor Things dispenses with such whimsy, as its protagonist, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), has no idea she’s being thrust into adulthood, and indeed has no choice in the matter. Almost immediately, Bella is forced to deal with the realities of maturation, and it leads to intriguing observations on expectation. Bella has an innate drive to explore both herself and the world around her, and that drive constantly clashes against what others expect, whether from the perspective of a father figure, a romantic partner, or society at large. Where that kind of willingness to discover is often stamped out before one graduates to maturity, Bella skipped that step altogether. 

And of course, there’s the Frankenstein’s monster of it all. Bella is definitely that, and without spoiling an early reveal, how this film’s Dr. Frankenstein, Godwin Baxter (played matter-of-factly by an in-his-element Willem Dafoe) brought his creation to life is equally as ethically disturbing as in Mary Shelley’s classic tale. However, Poor Things gives its monster an agency Frankenstein’s monster never had, and watching Bella grapple with the revelation and consequences of her own creation propels the film forward. 

The film iterates in other interesting ways, too. Most obviously, The Wizard of Oz is highly influential, at least in a technical stepping-into-a-new-world sense. The first part of the film is almost exclusively black-and-white, and it bursts into color when Bella physically enters a new world (albeit in a much more explicit way than Dorothy stepping out into Munchkinland).

There are also some very interesting technical choices that accentuate what’s happening with the writing and in the performances. Early on, the film liberally uses an ultra-wide-angle fisheye lens, adding distortion to echo Bella’s first moments of wide-eyed awe. Throughout, the production design feels familiar (the film is set in an approximation of Victorian London and Europe), but everything is slightly off or exaggerated—it’s steampunky (for example, there’s a horsehead mounted on a steam engine carriage), the skies are filled with swirling, watercolor clouds, and the sets are very stagey.  

All that said, Poor Things is admittedly a very strange film that takes a lot of chances, but Stone’s performance as Bella brilliantly pulls all the various strands of thought and flourish together. Stone is one of the best actors alive, thanks largely to her willingness to go there. The decisions she makes, both internally and externally, to portray Bella are extremely vulnerable, and they make an inherently unbelievable character believable. 

When the film gets into its second and third acts and transitions more from fish-out-of-water comedy and absurdity to elevated moral, ethical, and social commentary, mirroring Bella’s own development, it gets a little bogged down, and the seams begin to show. Even so, it largely avoids navel-gazing, and the slight meandering doesn’t ultimately negate the film’s positives. The sheer absurdity and provocativeness of Poor Things will certainly turn a large chunk of people off, but for those with whom its stylizations click, the film is wonderfully entertaining and thought-provoking.

Reed Ripley is a Kansas City attorney with a love for movies. You can find more reviews from Reed Ripley at Ripleysreviews.com

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