Emma Stone is having a moment. Maybe that was always on the cards, what with this being her second film with director Yorgos Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara after 2018′s The Favourite, their movie about an English monarch and her ladies in waiting, which was quite unlike any before it.
But as well as Poor Things, Stone has new TV series The Curse. She plays half of a reality TV/influencer couple doing good works in a poor neighbourhood while also gentrifying the place as renovate-and-flip property developers. The first episode suggests it’s a full-body-flinch cringe-comedy that won’t be for everyone. But, Stone and Nathan Fielder, as her husband, are terrific at playing awful people who consider themselves the good guys.
In the film, Poor Things, she’s largely the solo star of a very strange show. If The Favourite was a brilliant upending of the royalty period film, here, the Stone-Lanthimos-McNamara triumvirate have repeated the feat with Frankenstein-like mad scientists and their creations. It’s a film which out-Burtons early Tim Burton and out-Lynch’s Elephant Man-era David Lynch. It might be an absurdist steampunk feminist comedy of an elaborate design (in its visuals, costumes and music), but Stone’s performance is a lightning conductor for the whole thing. She keeps it sparking for its 140 minutes playing Bella as a mix of Frankenstein’s daughter and a happily horny Eliza Doolittle.
Poor Things comes from late, great Scottish author Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel of the same name. It was a very Glasgow-centric, very postmodern story-within-a story, complete with Gray’s own illustrations. The book was a veritable hall of mirrors inside a library full of much-thumbed copies of Frankenstein, Jekyll & Hyde, Pygmalion, with possible case notes on the Burke and Hare murders, and amusingly self-aware about its influences.
Sadly, perhaps, the movie ditches much of Gray’s socialist political themes, its historic Glasgow setting, its sleight-of-hand with its shifting narrators. The writer himself, who died in 2019, had been working on a screenplay for a decade after its publication. Judging by his archive in the National Library of Scotland (sample entry: “Revision of pages 63-71 eliminating Mr Astley from the Astley-Hooker-Bella triangle”), it ended up in a series of too-hard baskets.
McNamara-Lanthimos shift it out of Glasgow but keep the stuff about Bella going out and having her way with the world because, well, that’s sexier, and McNamara has done that before in three seasons of his Catherine the Great bawdy black comedy The Great.
In this film, Bella arrives as a physical adult with infantile demeanour – the film gives new meaning to the phrase “baby brain” – into the care of the brilliant Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). He’s a man whose face suggests he’s had some work done, possibly by a train, and whose menagerie of pets is a little mixed up.
Under the rationalist tutelage of the man she calls “God”, Bella is a quick study but very unfiltered. Her naivety about the mores of Victorian society, lack of impulse control and burgeoning libido are all very entertaining, but it’s not presented as a cute fish-out-of-water story. The “poor things” of the movie are the ones who just don’t see the world in her ever-questioning way.
Somewhere in there is a romantic melodrama. Having attracted attention and a proposal from Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), one of Dr Baxter’s students, she takes off on a Grand Tour of Europe with utter cad Duncan Wedderburn, played by Mark Ruffalo sporting a very twirlable moustache. There is much “furious jumping” between the pair (“Why do people not do this all the time?” laments a post-coital Bella), but with her growing intellect, she tires of him.
She has better, more audacious things to do with her time, all the way to a rug-pull of a twist that isn’t in the book but makes its own cruel sense here.
The book had about three different endings. The film’s one – and how Stone plays it – makes for a perfectly unnerving ending to a bizarre and brilliant movie. And one that makes The Favourite look positively Victorian.
Rating out of 5: ★★★★★
Poor Things directed by Yorgos Lanthimos is in cinemas now.
