141 min | R | December 8, 2023 | Searchlight Pictures
A scientist reanimates a drowned woman with the brain of an infant and turns her loose on the world. Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter learns to walk, talk, and want without anyone teaching her to feel ashamed. Polite society never stood a chance.
Bella Baxter is a grown woman with the brain of an infant. The scientist Godwin Baxter has reanimated her corpse and placed a baby’s mind inside an adult body. The film follows Bella as she learns to walk, speak, desire, and think with no inherited shame to hold her back. Yorgos Lanthimos builds a fable about what a woman becomes when society never gets the chance to train her into submission. The result is a story about appetite. Bella wants to taste everything the world offers and refuses to apologize for any of it.
Emma Stone plays Bella Baxter through a full arc of cognition. She begins with the lurching gait and blunt speech of a toddler and ends as a woman who reasons her way past every man who tries to own her. The performance is physical before it is verbal, and Stone commits to the awkwardness without ever asking for sympathy. Mark Ruffalo plays Duncan Wedderburn as a preening cad who mistakes seduction for control and unravels when Bella refuses to need him. Willem Dafoe plays Godwin Baxter with a scarred face and a wounded tenderness, a creator who must watch his creation outgrow him. Ramy Youssef plays Max McCandles with a gentle decency that the film treats as its own quiet test.
Lanthimos directs from a screenplay by Tony McNamara, who adapts the novel by Alasdair Gray. The camera distorts constantly. Fisheye lenses bend the edges of every room and keyhole irises close in on Bella like she is a specimen under glass. The film opens in stark black and white and bursts into saturated color the moment Bella leaves home, so the visual palette tracks her expanding consciousness. The production design builds a steampunk Lisbon and a candied Paris that look like nothing in the real world, which keeps the story locked inside Bella’s unschooled perception. The score scrapes and warbles with detuned strings that mirror her raw nervous system.
Poor Things uses its fantastical premise to ask a blunt question about freedom. Bella moves through the world without the conditioning that teaches women to be small, and every man she meets reveals himself by how he responds to that freedom. The film is funny and grotesque and frank about sex in a way that serves its argument rather than decorates it. Lanthimos refuses to soften Bella into a lesson or a victim. He lets her become a full person on her own terms. That is the rare fable that earns its strangeness.