In a very real sense, you had us at “Yorgos Lanthimos and Tony McNamara”. 2018’s The Favourite showed how perfectly the former’s eye for the visually abstract blends with the latter’s absurdist take on the period drama. Throw in Emma Stone (so good at delivering McNamara’s one-liners in The Favourite and Cruella) as an oddball and macabre promethean creation, Willem Dafoe as the eccentric surgeon that stitched her together and Mark Ruffalo as a deliciously moustache twirling cad and, well, you’re in, aren’t you?
Stone is on career-best form as Bella in this adaption of Alastair Grey’s 1992 novel. She begins the film with the mind of a bratty child, toddling around, spitting her food out and speaking in broken lines, and ends it as an articulate and sophisticated (if deeply deeply weird) young woman, rattling off idealistic social commentary in a tone familiar to anyone who saw Elle Fanning in McNamara’s excellent (and undeservedly cancelled) TV show, The Great. Stone is at the top of her game here, able to match those two poles and move her character gradually between them in a way that feels believable and narratively satisfying. There’s few in Hollywood who could pull it off, especially while ensuring that her bratty protagonist remains likeable. Bella’s desire to taste, touch, feel and engage in “furious jumping” with the entire world is contagious.
Visually, this is Lanthimos’ most ambitious and arguably most accomplished film. His amped-up Victorian world, globetrotting from London to Lisbon to Paris via steam driven ocean liner and steampunk cable car, blends the soft, sumptuous, technicolour fantasies of Powell & Pressburger, particularly A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes, with the exaggerated surrealist tones of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge. Lanthimos and DOP Robbie Ryan (another veteran of The Favourite) deploy a barrage of tricks: fish-eye lenses and heavy vignettes, moving between intense, exaggerated colours and monochrome and shooting in the art-house favourite 1.66:1 ratio. Those following Lanthimos’ career will see his fingerprints all over this: the palette pops brighter and the visual ticks ring louder than, say, The Lobster or Killing of a Sacred Deer, but there is a wryness and weirdness here as well as a willingness to let things go slowly that is typical of the director.
That being the case, it should be noted that this won’t be for everyone. Those with less tolerance for the self-consciously odd may find it gratingly indulgent and over-long. First time composer Jerskin Fendrix’s score is brilliant but it’s also unsettling and occasionally queasy. You wouldn’t put it on for a dinner party. Viewers coming to Poor Things because they enjoyed McNamara and Stone’s collaboration on Cruella may find themselves in unfamiliar cinematic territory that might not be to their tastes.
There’s also a slightly icky issue at the heart of the narrative around what constitutes the age of consent given the origins of Stone’s character – an element it’s difficult to outline without going into spoiler territory. The story never tackles this question properly, and we’re basically asked to accept the internal logic of the film and not think about it that closely. There’s another way of looking at the plot that is far less generous and substantially more uncomfortable. Tolerances will vary on that issue, too.
It’s not for everyone – Lanthimos’ films never are, though most viewers will find something to love in Dafoe (creepy, eccentric), Ruffalo (somewhere between Terry-Thomas, Rhett Butler and the duke from Moulin Rouge) and especially Stone’s performances. What Poor Things definitely is, is visually arresting, gorgeously made and, for most viewers at least, quite, quite fascinating. It’s certainly a conversation piece.
This is bold cinema, of a type we’re occasionally told never gets made anymore. It asks big questions, paints in bold strokes and will start discussions that will take you out of the theatre, down the road, into the pub and will probably still be going on all the way home.
