Delighted
How does director Yorgos Lanthimos make his films so crisp?
Poor Things
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos • Writer: Tony McNamara, based on the book by Alasdair Gray
Starring: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Suzy Bemba, Kathryn Hunter, Christopher Abbott
Ireland / UK / USA • 2hrs 22mins
Opens Hong Kong February 29 • III
Grade: A+
Poor Things is the feminist adventure about self-determination that picks Barbie up by the throat, shakes it vigorously and slams it to the ground before storming off triumphantly. I know. I’m a traitor to the sisterhood. Fight me. But This is a Yorgos Lanthimos film; he’s like a straight Pedro Almodóvar so it’s okay.
All roads so far – Dogtooth, The Lobster, The Favourite – lead to Poor Things. In many ways it’s the culmination of his career so far, so if you’re not a fan of his stylised performances, heightened dialogue and pitch dark humour, the Golden Lion winning Poor Things is not for you. For those of us who practically guzzled the Kool-Aid, Lanthimos and The Favourite writer Tony McNamara (who also created the Russian royalty satire The Great) fire on every single bloody cylinder they have from the opening credits (seriously, the credits in this film are beautiful) to the closing frames (35mm Kodak, baby!) in their loose adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s female spin on Frankenstein. In short, this is a coming-of-age story (yawn) about a young woman who leaves home, embarks on a Grand Tour, and finds her philosophical, moral, intellectual and sexual identity. But the young woman in this coming-of-age story starts life as a klutzy re-animated corpse with a baby brain, and finds herself in a Paris brothel. Yay!
Poor Things is best experienced blind. The less you know about Bella Baxter’s journey the better, and the more immersed in the surreal, absurd, endlessly engaging world you allow yourself to be, the better the experience. And if ever there was a film made for cinemas, this is it.
Suck it, Barbie
There’s an intensely clique-y element to Poor Things, but one that serves it well. Lanthimos has gathered his usual creative crew together, many of whom have dipped into their own Rolodexes for help, which could go a long way to explaining the seamlessness of vision here. It’s easy to imagine Lanthimos saying “That thing, that time in the short film,” and cinematographer Robbie Ryan (American Honey, The Favourite) replying, “Oh yeah, the blue one” and everyone getting it. The resulting aesthetic is one of the best since… checks notes… Lanthimos’s last film. Production designers Shona Heath (a relative newbie) and James Price (who worked on The Iron Claw, and go find this film right now) have created lush, plush, tactile spaces that Ryan complements with ultra-wide angles, hard black and white and super-saturated colour. In just her fourth feature film, costume designer Holly Waddington tracks Bella’s maturation by shoulder pad. Tremendous stuff.
There isn’t a single scene in Things’ two-plus hours that shouldn’t be there. We begin in a black-and-white London at an unspecified time, with mad surgeon-professor Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), AKA God, watching the progress of his enigmatic and entirely unfiltered creation Bella (Lanthimos muse Emma Stone). Her infantile brain has her shambling around the Wonderlandish mansion, her mind learning as she goes – things like words, passive aggressive power tactics, and the value of self-pleasure. God enlists his student Max McCandles (comedian Ramy Youssef) as an assistant for his Bella research in his home lab, and before you know it, Bella and Max are engaged. But along comes self-professed Great Lover Duncan Wedderburn (an absolutely perfect Mark Ruffalo), who whisks Bella off on a whirlwind adventure to Lisbon, Alexandria and Paris where she learns about egg tarts, inequality, Marxism, dancing, embracing her own agency and sex. Good thing too, because when she goes home, she needs all that wisdom for her final quest: to become a doctor.
Look, I like Stone way less than Lanthimos does, but there’s no denying her turn as Bella deserves that Oscar nod (though methinks she’s losing to Lily Gladstone). It’s an ambitious performance for an ambitious role, and if she’s out of step for a second the whole house of card collapses. She makes Bella’s growth organic, something to feel proud of her for, and she inhabits Bella so entirely you can almost predict what’s going to come out of her mouth. Almost, and “predict” in a way you know what good friends will say in a given situation. By the time she gets to Paris and meets the charmingly mercenary brothel owner Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) and finds an friend and ally in co-whore Toinette (Suzy Bemba) she’s grown up, and the final act feels like a victory lap. That goat zoom. Spectacular.
Stone is incredible but Poor Things is blessed with one of the strongest supporting casts of 2023, and every actor is meticulously calibrated to Lanthimos’s wavelength. McNamara’s script, as loaded as it is with glorious one-liners and witty non sequiturs, has plenty to say about female empowerment, control, class and social niceties (they’re kinda shit). But the alchemy Lanthimos summons to combine dark humour, gleeful weirdness and considered thought is itself a magic trick. Sure, there’s lots of odd sex, but Bella’s biggest leaps are made in locations outside the bedroom, which tips Lanthimos’s humanist hand. This is his best film to date, totally worth multiple viewings until we get Kinds of Kindness… Out yet? — DEK
the Complete Lanthimos
The Favourite made Yorgos Lanthimos more of an Oscar-winning household name, but his relatively small back catalogue is loaded with oddball delights.
Dogtooth (2009)
Lanthimos’s breakout stilted dramedy pivots on a control freak patriarch and the adult children he keeps locked inside a compound. Not a good idea.
Alps (2011)
A small business helping customers grieve by impersonating deceased loved ones goes about as conventionally as you’d expect in Yorgos’s world.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)
Barry Keoghan is all over the place, so check him out as a sinister, vengeful kid fucking with surgeon Colin Farrell, plus bizarre sex with wife Nicole Kidman.