Poor Things

Emma Stone

Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things is a amusing, but not particularly compelling, adaptation of Alasdair Gray's novel. The grotesque nature of the book, which concerns the maturation of a female Frankenstein's monster, would seem to be right up Lanthimos' alley, but the film, though salty, has little bite. A mad scientist (Willem Defoe) retrieves the body of a suicide victim from the Thames, implants the brain of the woman's unborn child into her head, flicks a switch and voila: a creature with the mind of an infant and the body of a woman. Emma Stone plays the peculiar creature, Bella Baxter, with great physical gusto, eliciting guffaws with her character's childlike abandon. Upon reaching psychological puberty, she decamps to Paris with a rake (Mark Ruffalo). She soon discards him, finding fulfillment in the sexual and social education she receives working in a bordello. 

The costumes, CGI, and production design make the film's Steampunk look attractive to the eye and the cast performs admirably. Yet, the film carries little excitement. In a fable like this one, there must be a touch of menace to the villainy. Lanthimos directs his male villains (Ruffalo and Christopher Abbott) too broadly. They are so buffoonish that they don't ever seem like much of a threat to the willful Bella in this feminist allegory of disentangling oneself from social strictures. Poor Things is Lanthimos' most crowd pleasing film, but also his most insubstantial.