The inspiration for Alasdair Gray’s novel on which Yorgos Lanthimos based his movie is Frankenstein, though Lanthimos tends to make fun of the more serious themes that Mary Shelley traded in, particularly the idea of a man aspiring to be God. The Dr. Frankenstein character in the story is Dr. Goodwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), who with his elaborate scars looks more like the monster than the creator but nonetheless has cultivated the kind of scientific approach that only a truly enlightened mind could conjure. His own creature, whom he names Bella (Emma Stone), is the reanimated body of a dead young woman whose brain has been replaced with that of her unborn child and, thus, is a fully formed adult with the mind of an infant that Baxter means to educate as benevolently as possible. Lanthimos plays this idea for all the laughs he can squeeze out of it but for the most part the slapstick formula of having Bella learn how to use a grown-up body while absorbing the world and what it has to teach her at breakneck speed makes for comedy that would quickly exhaust itself if everything else in the movie wasn’t so equally absurd. Stone is mainly responsible for the emotional tone of the film, but it’s the production design that prevents everything from flying out of the story’s dramatic orbit. Though ostensibly set in Victorian London, the world is a Gilliamesque jumble of anachronistic and imagined technologies. Baxter fits right in and so isn’t as frighteningly strange as he might have been in a more straightforward period melodrama.

The movie charts Bella’s odyssey of self-awareness, which in the context presented is a journey made gender-specific. She’s courted by not one but two eligible men, the first of whom is Baxter’s innocent and well-meaning young assistant (Ramy Youssef), who proposes marriage when Bella has yet to grok the concept; and the other the lascivious, worldly lawyer, Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), who, without any such scruples but a surfeit of money and chauvinist intentions, virtually abducts Bella to Lisbon, where she undergoes a crash course in sex and materialism, both of which her still developing sensibility appreciates immediately for how they fulfill her adolescent neediness. Her appetites become so fulsome that even Wedderburn can’t keep up with them, and then she meets a pair of intellectuals (Jarrod Carmichael, Hanna Schygulla) on a cruise who plant in her mind the idea that the world is also a place of pain, and suddenly sees it all around her. She now understands human agency and realizes just from everyday experience that, as a woman, she is not always her own person and leaves Wedderburn, taking employment at a brothel in Paris, because sex is the only economically viable activity she knows, even if she has to rewire her circuitry in order to make it work as a non-equitable transaction. In her relationship with the establishment’s madame (Kathryn Hunter), she sees where women fit into the capitalist ethos and means to change it.

There’s more, and if Poor Things has a narrative problem it’s that the plot never stands still long enough to make its wide-ranging thematic points fully felt. The last fourth, in fact, exploits the movie’s latent Victorian cliches in a way that’s too clever by half. The inventive machinations Gray incorporated into the climax are wasted, since they could have anchored a perfectly good full-length potboiler all by themselves. But that would have been a very different monster, so to speak. The one Lanthimos has built is unique in its sprawl and ambition, though I’d have to see it again to decide if it’s as good as he thinks it is.

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Poor Things home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 20th Century Studios