Poor Things (2024)

Written for RAF News January 2024

Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) is a young woman revived and reborn in Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest weird and wickedly funny flight of fancy. 5 years since their last collaboration on The Favourite, the darkly comic historical film that earned Olivia Coleman an Oscar, comes another plunge into black comedy, but this time in the suitably wonky realm of fantasy.

Willem Dafoe plays Dr Godwin Baxter, a monstrous genius both feared and admired by his peers. Godwin is guardian to Bella, a woman who has ostensibly become a child again and will have to relearn the ways of life. Desperately wanting to protect the product of his experimentation but knowing that she needs to explore for herself, ‘God’ (a playfully direct nickname) allows for her to be married away to a young assistant. Just as the arrangements are being made, Bella is swooped up and stolen away by lustful opportunist Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo).

Taken travelling around Europe, imagined here in a kaleidoscopic series of sets with gorgeous production design often captured with fish-eye distortion, this is a bizarre coming of age story that becomes a perverted reflection of recent blockbuster Barbie. Childlike at first, Bella moves with a toddlers gait and speaks in simple form, before learning of life’s pleasures and toddling headlong toward them. Delighted to be her hedonistic guide, Duncan is devious but never enough to quash Bella’s hunger to learn and experience more. Ruffalo is hilarious, his slightly off English accent only adding to his preposterousness, where Stone’s alien bluntness is able to cut through social niceties, right to the bone. 

Left to play in a genre where surrealism can stretch out quite comfortably, Lanthimos creates a raucous fairytale filled with sex, violence and mad science.

Some additional notes…

Playthings

When I first saw Poor Things I had thought that it was an interesting inversion of Barbie. Have seen a lot of throwaway comparisons made since but feel there’s a bit more to it.

Both protags are reborn, given a new life, uncorrupt and naive. The darker forces of the world are imposed on them, which they resist along with dominating suitors, building resilience and strength of character until they confront their creator – Barbie with the maternal godlike figure of Ruth Handler, Poor Things presents two fathers in the end, one a parody of the mad scientist ‘God’ and the other a sadistic general. 

The ending of both films hinges on their female lead gaining agency over their lives, symbolised by taking ownership of their genitalia – Bella Baxter defending against the threat of mutilation, and slightly more curious is Barbie’s installation of a vagina (is this what happened?? It seemed like it to me..)

Sexy Baby

Loved the reframing and examination of the infantilised romantic interest, like Leeloo from The Fifth Element (or any Besson girls really). Duncan Wedderbern has a notable disinterest when Bella begins to learn more and her language develops, saying out right that she’s losing the adorable way that she speaks. A paedophilic gesture that implies he misses his status and domain over her. Fucking brilliant.