Movie Review: Poor Things

Poor Things is the most movie of 2023. The latest from director Yorgos Lanthimos features big-name actors doing A LOT of acting while reciting bizarre, quirky dialog, lavish and extravagant sets and costumes, and a nearly two-and-a-half-hour-long runtime. It’s a whole lot of a movie, but a tiresome one when all is said and done.

Poor Things plays like a gonzo Frankenstein. Brilliant scientist Dr. Goodwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) finds the body of an aristocratic woman Baxter (Emma Stone) and brings her back to life and names her Bella Baxter, though she has the brain of an infant. Dr. Baxter spends his days experimenting, teaching at university, and teaching Bella as one would a child. He teaches her how to walk, talk, eat, what animals are, what manners are, and everything in between. With a yearning to learn more about the world and a need for excitement in her life, Bella runs away with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a slick and scummy lawyer. The two go on a whirlwind adventure across several continents where Bella makes discoveries about humanity, sexuality, and herself.

Lanthimos has one of the more unique voices in cinema today. The tone, dialog, and plots of his movies are in a world of their own. Poor Things is Lanthimos’s biggest world and he uses his style and motives to the max, which offers some great moments in the film as well as some puzzling and exhausting ones. Working with his biggest budget to date ($70 million), you can see Lanthimos didn’t waste a dime on this movie and every cent is on the screen. The costumes are gorgeous, the sets, from Dr. Baxter’s mansion to the cruise ship, to downtown Paris, are massive, layered, and beautiful and the hair and make-up are expertly crafted. The coloring and the visual effects are smartly to give the film life and pop off the screen, particularly when the film goes from the black and white color pallet of Dr. Baxter’s mansion to the colorful glory of the outside world, a sort of Wizard of Oz moment for Bella as she enters a new world full of wonder and hope.

Poor Things was shot by Robbie Ryan, the Oscar-nominated cinematographer who worked with Lanthimos on The Favourite and whose work I genuinely like (see American Honey or Slow West for his best work). However, some of Lanthimos’s shot decisions in the film were puzzling, particularly at the beginning of the film. While I appreciate that the film was shot on film, there were several shots, lenses, and angles that didn’t make sense to me. Lanthimos leans heavily into the warped, fisheye look in the film and he even uses iris shots a few times. Neither of these shots were effective and instead just felt like Lanthimos used them because he wanted to. Lanthimos has used the fisheye look in his films before, but here it felt forced and overused. I kept thinking about Kenneth Branagh’s A Haunting in Venice, a film that also features bizarre shot choices. But in Branagh’s film, he uses unconventional shots to convey an unsettling feeling that our main character was feeling. But in Poor Things, they don’t feel like they have a purpose and only distract rather than enhance the film.

You are going to be hearing a lot about the performances in Poor Things for months to come, as they are bound to be strong contenders during the awards season. Emma Stone goes all out for her performance as Bella Baxter. She throws on an accent, must act like she’s a baby for the beginning of the film, and then grows into a smart, independent woman all while learning about sexuality and humanity. Stone bares it all in a daring performance. Ruffalo is having a blast as the greasy, despicable Wedderburn. Dafoe is arresting as Dr. Baxter, and Christopher Abbott shows up in the last act of the film to play an awful, terrible human but does so in a captivating way. While these performances will garner awards over the next few months, they all felt too much. There was little to no subtlety in any of the performances and it felt like Lanthinmos kept pushing his actors to be more ridiculous and say even more bizarre things and didn’t try to ground them even in the slightest. I don’t hate these performances and found it fun to see Stone and Ruffalo give performances unlike anything they’ve ever given, but none of them clicked for me.

While everything else in Poor Things is big, bold, and brash, the themes of female empowerment and independence are not. The film bludgeons you over the head with these themes ad nauseam to the point where I wanted to yell, “Alright! We get it!” For a film that is so bold in its aesthetics, it is rather thin in its messaging.

By the end of the film, I was exhausted. The humor had run mostly dry, the performances were getting tiresome, the messaging was loud and clear, and the story had run its course. Poor Things is Yorgos Lanthimos off the leash and the result is a mixed bag of beautiful aesthetics, but over-the-top performances for the sake of a thin theme. I commend Lanthimos for taking the huge swing, it’s just a shame it didn’t fully connect for me.

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