Poor Things: A Surreal Feminist Tale of Rebirth and Rebellion!
Mary Shelley and Mary Woolstonecroft are smiling together somewhere with the release of Poor Things.
The opening image is that of embroidered blankets in heroin Bella’s boudoir. Bella is played with icehouse lunacy by Emma Stone (Zombieland, Superbad).
A stark image of a Victorian woman jumping off a bridge, face unseen. We then meld into the abstract image of an anxious heart or brain in black and white, the damaged organs of the fallen woman no doubt.
“Poor Things” title cards like a rock star.
The black and white filmic style is continued as Bella overarches her shoulders and plays off key on a grand piano.
A man in a scarred face, later named God who is a mad scientist (a meta play on Dr. Frankenstein), is played with precision by Willem Dafoe (The Lighthouse, Pasolini, Antichrist), who traverses through a modern version of an old Victorian house to meet Bella misplaying the ivories. He smirks at her attempt. Emma then plays with her hands and feet simultaneously. We get it. Odd duck; “touched” as they used to say. God seems to be Bella’s ward.
At dinner there is an overly intricate coffee percolator and over the table are three or four heat lamps I believe. Quirky!
Emma eats with her hands, not yet civilized. Child-like. She spits the food out of her mouth.
The scarred man, God, belches out a bubble that looks like a globe which makes Emma clap. He detaches some tube from his side. Some steampunk contraptions of sorts. He gets up to leave the house.
She says “Papa, Papa” over and over and walks like Frankenstein’s Monster as a child in a woman’s body. Behind her walks a dog with a duck’s head sewn on. Oh God, you maniac, you so crazy! Obviously, this scarred man is a meddler of nature.
Now at a teaching hospital the scarred man, a surgeon we discover, finds an admirer, and makes him his assistant. Lots of Frankenstein vibes already.
Bella smacks the assistant in the face after jumping in her creator’s arms. “What a beautiful retard!” the assistant proclaims. He confesses her brain is damaged and not synchronized to her age. Child brain in adult woman body. She pees her pants. The assistant is tasked with overseeing her progress.
Scarred surgeon God allows her in the room with the training cadavers and she grabs one’s flaccid penis and stabs him in the eyes repeatedly ‘cause she likes the squishing noise.
She rides a weird Victorian bicycle indoors. Then feeds the baby calf with a duck’s head and the duck… with a dog’s head. What a great surgeon. Doctor Doolittle watch out!
“Why pen book every night?” Bella asks the assistant in her broken Franken-English. He dotters about and explains to her places on the map.
Bella goes up a spiral staircase to the roof where all of London can be seen. She throws something off the roof and claps to her own echo.
The assistant sees the scar in the back of her neck where brain damage emanated from.
Bella visits God and says she wants to go outside “Now!” and breaks stuff like a spoiled little girl until he lets her go somewhere.
They all go out in a carriage with a fake horse head on it that’s actually running on steam. God warns Bella that everything outside can kill her. It’s not safe for her. But being the beautiful retard she is, just runs out and does dead leaf angels in the dirty ground.
The assistant shows Bella a frog. Bella says “kill it” innocently and then slaps it dead in his hands without conscience.
God relays why his thumbs are funny because his father broke them as an experiment to see if he could get them to revert? (To what? Create a pre-thumb version of man? Did that even exist? Reverse bone cycle growth? Just to see what happens? Just more lunatic Victorian “science” I guess, it’s the motif!)
More carriage. Bella wants to stop for ice cream. God says “No!” She insults him. She screams at him. Loses her mind and tries to jump out of the moving carriage. They restrain her. He chloroforms her unconscious. Typical Patriarchy!
The assistant sets her down and her tender breast falls asunder. He gently covers her while still taking a generous looksie.
A nurse undresses Bella.
The assistant finds proof of some brain manipulation techniques in some blueprint/schematic in the possession of God. He threatens to take it to the police.
We see a flashback in colour of Bella leaping to her (brain injury) intended as a suicide. Same woman as from the opening (of course). A further colour flashback reveals she was pregnant and instead of her going to hell for suicide he rationalizes, he decides to transplant her baby’s brain into her body. That certainly is a twist on abortion via suicide. Points! Electroshock rejuvenates the brain to “Alive!” status. James Whale would be proud! Tom Hanks’ BIG meets Frankenstein.
Bella even sits at the post “Alive!” scene breakfast table: the one so deliciously mocked in Young Frankenstein with good cause for its totally inappropriate Victorian serenity. Only Bella eats alone at this incarnation and begins to masturbate. Somewhere Madelaine Khan’s ghost is singing “At last, sweet mystery of life, I’ve found you!”
God tells the assistant he sees love between him and Bella. And offers marriage to them both.
The assistant is pretending his best not to want this pedophilic relationship to which he’s already exchanged ear kissings with her.
The assistant asks her to marry. She offers to touch “genital pieces.” He rejects because she’s “special.” How noble!
God creates a contract with a lawyer played by Mark Ruffalo (I Know This Much Is True) who marvels at the specificity of the contract to contain her as he gazes aspirationally out the window. He excuses himself to the bathroom only to peak like an arrogant pervert at this lady kept under God’s lock and key.
Ruffalo finds Bella in a closet, feet in the air. He advises against such marriage contracts. He then grabs her by the pussy and she loves it. He then insults the town they live in as a dumpy little berg.
Later Bella is masturbating and Ruffalo comes to her window like a lecherous Romeo.
They meet on the roof to fireworks. She is seduced to run away with Ruffalo but being so innocent she tells God and her idiot pedo-fiancé (the assistant) of her plans to touch genitals with Ruff first.
Assistant threatens to kill Ruffalo which excites Bella. She initiates a kiss. Then smothers him with chloroform. God wishes her farewell and sews money into her clothes for her adventures.
Assistant wakes up with a bizarre rooster bodied/pig-headed chimera on his stomach. He finds God and asks why he didn’t stop her? Yeah, God what’s up wit’ dat?!
Because she’s a being of free will. That explains the trainwreck to cum.
God says, “You are too emotional. We are men of science.“
“I just hope she’s alright.“
Cut to Bella fucking Ruffalo and enjoying herself fully. She enjoys oysters and champagne.
Title card “Lisbon, Portugal”, with her in black and white riding an old-fashioned depiction of a whale (looks more like a piranha). Lisbon looks like the pirate port set from Steven Spielberg’s Hook or Popeye.
Soon they fuck in multiple positions in that stilted, autistic, joyless, and kinetic way you might find a bisexual woman getting summarily fucked by the warden in Orange is the New Black. With vigor yet with complete emotional disconnection.
She asks if not sex having as long as women are a physiological weakness in men. Ruffalo concurs begrudgingly. So off she roams the second Ruffalo is asleep.
The Terry Gilliam fisheye cam is a bit overused here in idealized Lisbon.
Bella wanders through Lisbon to find a matron playing a mandolin. She vomits on a vista view. She returns to Ruffalo and he’s upset she just wandered off.
She takes her pants off and tells him to do his “furious jumping.” Candid lil minx, isn’t she?
She exchanges sexual barbs about spitting semen with some contemporary of Ruffalo’s and then threatens to punch a baby that cries annoyingly in the restaurant they are in.
Ruffalo confines her by insulting her for being crude, uncultured. Grabbing her arm.
She slaps then kisses him tightly in the hallway.
She then runs off. Gets drunk on her own. And again, stumbles back on her own to Ruff who’s upset at his lack of control over her.
A wealthy random woman claims to know Bella, but she refutes the claim. Perhaps pre-brain transplant?
Ruffalo hates that he’s become the jealous boyfriend. Bella just dances retardedly to some retarded instrumentation resembling music. Ruffalo joins her and they dance, well, retardedly: Gypsy, French slap couple, Waltz, Beyonce, I don’t know!
Ruffalo’s about to go down on her but he spots a couple tramp stamps on the inner thighs that some guy fondled while she was out and about.
Mark’s in Ruff shape. He headbutts the table twice (that can’t be good for his brain tumour). She confesses another guy ate her out. Two can tongue play. What’s the complication? Indeed!
“Are you crying?” She asks Ruffalo. “What a confusing person you are” she says as she pats him on the back.
Elsewhere, God is handed a scalpel by Assistant. He falls down. He confesses Bella is gone.
Ruffalo hijacks Bella onto a cruise voyage. She feels trapped. She wanders around the boat.
Title card “The Ship.”
Mark Ruffalo confesses his love for Bella. She doesn’t understand subjective feelings. Not empirical enough.
She meets an old Lady that she finds interesting. “At my age it’s what’s between my ears that concerns me. What’s between my legs, less so.“
“I do hope you enjoy your hand between your legs at times.” She is delighted to hear that she does. A black fellow at the old lady’s table questions Mark, does the lady not take friends? That upsets Ruffalo.
In private, he wants to marry her, but she reminds him she’s going to marry another. He cries again. She walks off again for more adventures.
Meanwhile, the assistant throws a ball at another young, handicapped woman’s head. She begins to cry pitifully which is for some reason played for pure laughs.
Bella is reading more. Learning, talking to her new friends. This parable of a woman coming of age in the modern world continues into a new phase, from child to inquiring mind.
Ruffalo threatens to throw her old friend Martha overboard. Farcically he cannot.
Inevitable as the sun rises, Bella ends up in the bed of Martha’s black intellectual companion and wants to know the “true way of the world” as Mark gambles away. And just as inevitably they cut-away from whatever they pretended to imply with this diversionary tactic. Then onto some bizarre overview of “Alexandria” about babies, rape, they’d rape us if we go down there, and we’d do the same if we were “down there with them?” Talk about not talking about what you really wanted to talk about. It’s so cryptic it’s nonsensical what’s being unsaid without being said here. Blah!
She runs down the steps of a Greek Palace like something out of Boom, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Only it’s her biting the black guy’s hand, feigning some melodramatic unexpressed moment. This is just some bullshit. Some dodge, implying some abuse while skirting the balls to show whatever it is. Cowards.
Meanwhile Ruffalo won all the money at the casino when gambling and was robbed? Bella says she took it and… gave it to the poor of Greece??? Strange. Greece? Really? Not Africa. Greece?! I need a bullshit decoder ring to understand the purpose of all this political bullshit.
Her black friend says he wanted to hurt her but could not hurt such dumb beauty? And states Religion, Socialism, Capitalism nothing helps the world. That makes not helping everyone very easy. Thanks totally average guy in a movie for the sermon. Bella kisses him on the cheek.
Next stop/title card: “Paris.“
She feels bad for losing all Ruffalo’s money, so some French Madame convinces her to sell her sex for money. He pre-jacks inside her (apparently completely unconcerned with pregnancy in a very annoyingly unrealistic, revisionist, illogical way).
Ruffalo has had enough. He takes her last bit of money sewn in her clothes after realizing she’s a failed experiment and now a whore.
Bella runs back to the Madame to whore for return fare. Bella enjoys a Frenchman. Madame teaches her “some men enjoy when you don’t like it. It’s good business.” Such sage advice for young minds.
Many random French Johns endure her tedious pretexts which are wearing thin. She’s just got a screw loose and she’s trying everyone. Eventually two underage boys get a sex education with their dad fucking Bella. Yawn.
Eventually the French Madame bites her? Not sure the meaning of that.
Bella confesses her empathy is gone and all that’s left is rage. Instantly she’s having a lesbian encounter with her black hand maiden. Why not?
The assistant meets Ruffalo in the insane asylum. He warns that she destroyed him. The assistant doesn’t care. Ruffalo mocks the assistant’s innocence in seeking Bella. Can’t blame him there.
Bella gets a postcard that God is dying soon. She returns to visit him. More worldly but none the wiser.
God then confesses that she had an accident and that she switched her brain for her own child’s and confronts her fiancé who apologizes.
Lots of apologies from God. Yawn.
She wonders if all her whoring will upset her innocent boyish fiancé. (A little late to care about him). He says he’s jealous others have been with her. A willing cuck I see. This was more touching when Jenny finally decided to sleep with Forrest Gump, I must say.
God walks her down the aisle on cocaine. (Always a good choice).
But then her former life before her attempted suicide and brain transplant comes into disrupt the finale. She confronts a brutal, sadistic alternate reality that caused her near “departure.” A handsome, tyrant husband.
Tyrant husband tells her “Jesus Christ himself would beat you with a bat for what you’ve done” (great line), basically for her whoring and killing her unborn child apparently. Side query: Did they even have ‘baseball bats’ back then?
Soon locked castle doors and a labia cutter await her. What a bummer. She’d rather die.
Ludicrous ending alert. God dies, winks from her black lesbian lover, her cuck husband is happily doing surgeries to “correct” her past. Delirious film ending! Reality be damned!
Poor Things Uppers:
Emma Stone’s performance is exacting, and the character is immense in its implications as a feminist synecdoche, an encapsulation or parable of the female experience from childhood to adulthood. The characterizations are marvellous. The acting by everyone is rich as is the metaphor of “womankind is God’s Frankenstein Monster.”
The direction by Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth, The Killing of a Sacred Deer) is expert and he creates an interesting world with interesting characters.
Poor Things Downers:
The illusiveness of the film’s theme is the only furtive black spot I could notice. But that would be like asking ‘What is the Theme of Womankind itself these days?” Are women really onboard with this Great Unrepressing or “Girls Gone Wild” reality? Or are they just doing what society encourages them to do, or are discouraged to do for themselves? Is it malleableness and more manipulation sold as “free love” or “sexual liberation” or self-instructed sovereignty that leads women to indulge without decent restraint? Is this aberration a true heart of some woman? Or just some fashionable, lunatic fringe? Or worse yet, is it all just more Patriarchy projecting on woman, like some Solaris-styled, male fantasy of what they want a woman to be. What do they want? They want them to be sluts without the restraint of childbearing (the only thing encouraged to be discouraged, an almost shameful act in some “brave” social circles). Which is all to say, the sex scenes were drab. I kid.
Overall, there’s a kind of narcissism or more generously, a taking stock in one’s metaphorical collective female self, in having the only child permitted being in one’s own head, locked safely away from the question of future female babies as part of the topic of what it means to be a woman in the modern world. Apparently that part of the female modern world is neatly cut-out, around in this story. There’s no place for it here in this metaphor.
Also, the whole opening of the door for pedophile rationalization imbedded in this “unsynchronized brain to her body” logic is nasty and I see you there. Hi! On the Disney+ now I see! How completely suitable for children this is for Disney +. Marvellous to see you there! This would make a create double feature with Cuties in the rationalizing childhood sexuality department.
Overall, Poor Things is a strong meta narrative that combines strong feminist ideas with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I watched this movie twice. It made me think. It made me cringe. It made me roll my eyes. It gives one a lot of food for thought and I recommend it on that level. I do not recommend it as a ‘sexy exploitation’ movie. It owns its own exploitation that makes it, well, not as exploitative. There was no love in this movie. It was stripped of all human affection and genuine connection. It’s a nihilistic kind of film with a fugue state ending. This film is a mental asylum. I will leave it to you whether it is appropriately located or not given that it is populated by so many interesting feminist ideas.
Directed by: Yorgos Lanthimos
Written by: Tony McNamara, Alasdair Gray
Produced by: Ed Guiney, Yorgos Lanthimos, Andrew Lowe, Emma Stone
Cinematography by: Robbie Ryan
Editing by: Yorgos Mavropsaridis
Music by: Jerskin Fendrix
Special Effects by: Gábor Kiszelly
Cast: Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo, Ramy Youssef
Year: 2023
Country: USA, Ireland, UK, Hungary
Language: English
Colour: Colour
Runtime: 2h 21min
Studio: Element Pictures, Film4, Fruit Tree, Hungarian Tax Credit, Searchlight Pictures, TSG EntertainmentDistributor: Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment
Poor Things
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