Update | Venice 2023: Poor Things movie review – Emma Stone gives it her all in Yorgos Lanthimos’ best film winner, a wonderfully bizarre sexual comedy
- Feminism meets science fiction in morality tale of a Frankenstein-like figure, Bella (Stone), reanimated by Willem Dafoe’s scientist who craves self-knowledge
- Adapted from an Alasdair Gray novel, and with cameos by Margaret Qualley and Mark Ruffalo, Poor Things, best film at the Venice festival, is visually dazzling
4/5 stars
Six years on from The Favourite, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos returns with another idiosyncratic, twisted vision.
Nominally set in the Victorian era, this masterful morality tale blends period science fiction with a feminist story of discovery. Or, as one character notes, it’s about “a woman plotting her course to freedom”.
That woman is Bella, played by Emma Stone. The American star has never been more courageous than she is here, in a role that easily could’ve slipped down a cinematic ravine and left her stranded.
Bella’s father figure is a Scottish scientist named Godwin, played by Willem Dafoe, whom she calls ‘God’ for short, for he is her creator. A suicide case, Bella has been reanimated, a child’s brain replacing her own, which accounts for why her motor and language skills are barely functioning.
She walks like Frankenstein’s monster – an impressive feat of physical performance by Stone – and has little experience of the outside world. But when Godwin brings in his student Max (Ramy Youssef) to observe her, she begins to crave self-knowledge.
