Worth: $19.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo, Ramy Youssef
Intro:
Poor Things’ grand exploration of human identity is thrilling where it could be pompous because the protagonist at its heart is thoroughly sketched and expertly performed.
Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest film, Poor Things, is truly a feast for the senses, a delicious and dreamy Frankenstein tale of a woman’s quest for autonomy. It tells the story of a doctor named Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), who reanimates the dead body of a young lady (Emma Stone) through means only exposed at the film’s end. With the mind and capabilities of an infant, God (as she aptly calls him) names his creation Bella and makes her his ward.
Having never ventured outside the family home, Bella, like the adult children of Lanthimos’ Dogtooth, is cloistered in a perpetual childhood. Naturally then, Bella and God’s cocoon of weird domestic bliss is threatened when a lusty lawyer named Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) arrives on the scene. He swiftly sweeps Bella away to Europe on a journey of erotic wonderment, stealing her from her creator and her gentle fiancée, medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef).
Ruffalo is superb as Bella’s desperate, moustached lover, brooding about hotel rooms and hilariously shouting her name à la Stanley Kowalski. Youssef provides a tender counterpoint to Bella’s kind-hearted but slightly unhinged father-figure and the possessive Duncan, loving her without wanting to own her. Yet, while each of these men help to shape Bella, it is only once she sets course alone that she comes to her most complex realisations.
Lanthimos does an excellent job of conveying Bella’s development via space. God’s home vividly evokes the crooked interiors of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Nosferatu, shot in expressionistic black and white and suffused in shadow. Through God’s house, Lanthimos cleverly deploys the style of cinema’s most primordial films to express Bella’s wild, childish subjectivity. The magnificent jewel tones that saturate Lisbon give it an air of sensuous excitement as Bella discovers sex, Portuguese tarts and dancefloors. However, when she eventually realises what it is to feel disgust and injustice, the world moves into much sharper focus, Bella’s frilly clothing, darkening and the light, hardening. As Bella steadily wrests a stronger grip on her own destiny, her environment similarly becomes more controlled and clarified, as though she and her world form one glorious, ever mutating corpus. Indeed, in the words of one wise character, “when we know the world, the world is ours.”
While the scenery is resplendent, it is Stone that shines brightest, each jerk of the arm and graceful bow of the neck somehow both highly deliberate and wholly natural. Often caught in moments of curious thought, Lanthimos’ closeups deftly capture the depths of expression that pour from her huge green eyes.
Poor Things’ grand exploration of human identity is thrilling where it could be pompous because the protagonist at its heart is thoroughly sketched and expertly performed. Bright, charismatic and brave, Bella stands as one of this year’s most delightful and electrifying cinematic heroines.
