Poor Things Review

Saltburn has intrigued me this awards season because people who feel obligated to follow Oscar bait and people caught up on the grotesque buzz (masquerading as something worth seeing), are experiencing something far more horrific than they bargained for with that film.

Similarly, Poor Things has some truly icky scenes (there's lots of nudity, graphic scenes of surgery and eye stabbing, just be prepared to close your eyes at the right moments) that might generate enough cringe to get people into the theater out of morbid curiosity. And then there's Willem DaFoe's grotesque face and the way he burps liquid mercury. As opposed to Saltburn, this delights me because Poor Things is a beautiful unconventional film, but leaves the same meaningful emotional payoff as you hope most love stories would do. Willem Defoe plays a Frankenstein-type, Dr. Godwin Baxter, who re-animates a pregnant suicide-by-drowning victim. His solution is to put the fetus's brain into the grown Emma Stone's body (again, yes, it's very icky, just move past it, people). As such, she starts out like a version of Beck Bennett's baby boss on SNL with a lack of mental acuity to compliment her lack of motor movement. A large through line of the film is all the subtle ways in which she grows into an adult over the course of the film. Without seeing this films, it might seem ludicrous to award a 35-year-old actress who already has an Oscar over someone who seems as worthy as Lily Gladstone (partially because it feels right to give it to a Native American, partially because it's the right type of role, and partially because Gladstone makes a lot out of being passive), but the way Emma Stone's performance is simply too good to ignore. If she wins, it would mark one of the rare moments where a comic performance wins anyway. Godwin wants his character to marry his protege Max, (Ramy Yousef), and while Godwin genuinely cares for her in a paternal way. it's also uncomfortable: She's still pretty close to having the mentality of an infant. Max's earnest declarations of love for her, don't erase the logistical obstacle of connecting with someone who's psychologically a child. Issues of consent aside (I generally don't police fictional works from earlier eras for age-consent issues), there's not really much convincing that Max initially loves her for anything other than her looks? Her next suitor, Duncan (Mark Ruffalo), is a total sleaze but he is at least transparent of his lust for her because of her virginal qualities. In the film's second act, Duncan takes her out and the classic virgin/slut dichotomy comes into play: Duncan's carnal desire for her is because she's virginal, and he goes insane with jealousy at knowing that she shares her sexual exploration with others. Cleverly, the film implies that it's a literal form of madness and then shows him actually going mad. As this is a story of what it means to be human and how one grows into it under conventional circumstances, the central characters we care about (Godwin and Max, in addition to Bella) arrive there as well. Like some of the biggest names of the year (Alexander Payne, Todd Haynes, Greta Gerwig, David Fincher and Christopher Nolan), Yorgos Lanthimos is not a man who makes movies that are ordinary. He will reinvent the wheel each time out. Sure, there are flaws in his style. Like Todd Haynes' May December, the string score can be obnoxious, the film can overly indulge in the gross, and there is way more CGI than needed. But he's always original and in a film like this, it's a story that works beautifully. This might also be the best ensemble of the year despite the way that Holdovers deserves credit for such fully realized characters, and films like Killers of the Flower Moon, Barbie, Asteroid City, and Oppenheimer crammed such an impressive number of high-profile actors onto the same set. Aside from the performances of Ramy Yousef (a comedian who has his own show, this is his coming out performance in someone else's film), DaFoe, Stone, and Mark Ruffalo in the lead, there's a lot of smaller parts to appreciate. Margaret Qualley cameos as the mad scientist's replacement experiment, Christopher Abbott is an able villain and then there's the delightful Martha. Played by Hanna Schygulla, Martha should get a scene stealer of the year award: She lets a developmentally disabled person ask to touch her hair (resembling Effie in the Hunger Games) and probe her sexual history, then being such a good sport about Duncan wanting to drown her in a fit of rage.