Bold, Weird, and Colorful Poor Things Unleashes Emma Stone
Yorgos Lanthimos’ off-kilter, pastel-drenched Poor Things opens with static shots of silken embroidery. It is hard to ascertain the images themselves, threaded so neatly in a near-identical gray. But the slippery, elusive texture is integral to the film, which weaves together something thick and rich with detail. What follows is narrow in its focus and big and engulfing in its scale: The story of a young woman who must overcome the experiments enacted against her while embracing her changing body and irrepressible urges.
As such, this adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s book of the same name is difficult to summarize, loosely following Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) as she grows to embrace adulthood despite the overbearing tutelage of her de facto father God (Willem Dafoe). Once introduced to the dashing and cocky Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), Bella recognizes the pitfalls of her sheltered life and endeavors to travel around the world, experiencing life anew before marrying her father’s sweet and bumbling assistant Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef). It picks up on many of the themes the director has concerned himself with, digging into the ways in which people will torture one another rather than accept the pain that lies dormant in their past, unwittingly exacting an interpersonal cost.
Lying in the genre gulf between science fiction and straightforward drama, Poor Things also finds time to unleash Stone’s ability as a physical comedian, building a sticky, entrancing bodily language that lives somewhere between twitchy, childlike enthusiasm and mystical knowingness. She wanders through their eclectic family home with an unsteady gait, crashing into delicately hung porcelain displays and cackling rather than cowering at the destruction which follows.
Poor Things is held together by a consistent, if quiet, understanding of bodily autonomy—a radical perspective that hums through the story, animating it with a fresh, loose outlook. Early on, Bella cuddles next to God, naively inquiring, “Bella nowhere girl. Where that be? Nowhere?” That question of placement, and the elusive idea of origin which promises clarity, underscores her character—each new stop in her journey of discovery only upending the truth she had just adopted. As Poor Things progresses, and the cities Bella visits are methodically ticked off, her inner compass is battered against the sharp corners of the world, scrambling her sense of personhood and moving her (and us) further into the arena of the bizarre and uncanny—into “nowhere.”