Part sexual awakening, part tribute to classics such as Moll Flanders, Dracula, Frankenstein and Pygmalion, part jaded commentary on the ills of society, but most of all, sheer wacky good fun, Poor Things is out on its own for an absorbing couple of hours and a truly remarkable performance by Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, daughter of God.
Except he’s God as in all-powerful scientist surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe with Herman Munster-type scars and stitches with their own story) and she’s not really his daughter, although he created her.
It’s a brilliantly funny script by The Favourite’s Tony McNamara and the late Alisdair Gray, based on his novel.
Bella walks at first like a 2-year-old, and speaks like one, but gradually morphs into a fully functioning, actually over-functioning, adult.
She’s outspoken, socially conscious, really hates the divide between rich and poor, is unacceptably rude in the minds of so-called civilised people, and yet she’s somebody we might all love to be, even for a day.
Yorgos Lanthimos has created another startling world for Emma Stone to shine in.
He did it for her in The Favourite, where she, Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz all imbued their roles with the sort of hedonistic, do-it-and-be-damned attitude that wants to burst out of Bella, and does.
But while The Favourite’s sets were over the top but believable, the sets for Poor Things are steampunk-influenced, unashamedly speculative and almost surreally Victorian, but then so are the characters.
It’s fitting that most interiors, street-scenes and even a luxury liner are overly colourful, reminiscent of garish pop-up books from the 1930s, ornate and with stairs and corridors that twist and turn just a bit too much.
As God, Willem Dafoe is a version of Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein merged with his creation the Creature, who has ideas for surgery that he explains apparently rationally, but which are altogether too creative for anyone’s good.
Unlike Mary Shelley’s character, God is never plagued with guilt over his experiments, just as Bella is never plagued with guilt by her exploits.
It’s fascinating to see the way God lovingly influences the development of Bella’s moral code, her language and her adventurous spirit.
Some smaller roles stand out: Ramy Youssef’s Max McCandles, the only sensible character, upstanding, straight and dull, Kathryn Hunter as Swiney, the leathery madam of a Paris brothel, Hanna Schygulla as Martha, an intrigued passenger on the luxury liner, an independent woman of another kind altogether, and Mark Ruffalo as Duncan Wedderburn, a very rich fool incapable at first of constancy but eventually besotted by Bella and literally pulling his hair out with impotent rage over her insatiable cavorting.
All three dose their roles with just the right amount of spoofing.
Holly Waddington’s costume design is wonderful.
Overall, a very entertaining film for adults prepared to expand their sense of humour into previously unexplored territory.
