Poor Things

Self-actualization is a complicated, chaotic, exhilarating thing. We all stumble along, feeling our way through the vast expanse of the world as we grow up, making messes but learning all the while, too. None of us ask to be born, but we all are tasked with making sense of it and making ourselves, even if it takes our whole lives. Therein lies the thrill of life: We must lean into it all, the pleasures and the pain, to be human. So goes the story of Bella Baxter (Stone), the heart and soul of Poor Things, the latest film from director Yorgos Lanthimos.

Based on the novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray, Poor Things is a period Frankenstein piece that is also a story for our times. It's a journey toward self-actualization and autonomy that relishes in the tactile pleasures of life without shying away from the contradictory, messy parts.

Bella is the reanimated creation of Dr. Godwin Baxter (Dafoe, surprisingly moving and funny), an unorthodox scientist marked and maimed by his father's experiments. He is protective of Bella, hiding her away from the world even though she yearns for more. When a dedicated student, Max McCandles (Youssef), begins studying and then becoming enamored with Bella, she begins to slowly learn about the world and her hunger for adventure grows. As Bella becomes increasingly aware of the outside world and of her own body and its capacity for pleasure, she decides to escape to travel the world with sleazy lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo). Her travels with and without him are transformative, letting Bella come into her own, with all the complications that come with it.

A constant complication that Bella faces is the discomfort of the men around her as she comes into her own. Even the well-meaning, caring men in her life, like the good doctor and McCandles, want to rein her in and exert control over her. It’s a struggle every woman can understand: men being intimidated and confused by a woman who knows exactly what she wants and runs after it. It also speaks to the complications Bella runs into with sex, which serves as her great awakening to the world and her own bodily autonomy. Later in the film, she works at a brothel, learns about all the different desires men have, and is confused by the idea that some men want to have sex with women even if the women don’t. In these ways, this movie is incisive about patriarchy and the insidious ways it seeps into life through not only obviously nefarious men but well-meaning ones, too.

Poor Things balances sincerity with a delicious unpredictability. Bella is a woman who has the most thrilling opportunity – coming into her own sexually and intellectually with no shame. She carries none of the societal pressures of being a woman, freeing her and the movie to follow her whims. We often can’t track where Bella’s desires will take her, meaning the film’s plot unfolds in gloriously chaotic fashion. It’s a thrill to surrender to a movie and let it lead you through all its discoveries and revelations – even if you don’t know where it’s going.

Not only is it perfectly paced and sequenced, Poor Things looks beautiful, too. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan captures Bella’s lush, surreal world beautifully – first in stark black-and-white and then in storybook-perfect colors. The ensemble cast is delightful, with Ruffalo's Wedderburn a great pathetic, comedic foil to Stone’s determined, headstrong Bella.

Poor Things is a revelation, a potent story about self-creation that’s worth seeking out, and that’s worth getting lost in.