poor things

I’m a big fan of Yorgos Lanthimos’ work. Like many people, I caught wind of his films with the weird, goofy, and outrageous The Lobster, and since then I’ve been eagerly awaiting his next films to see what he might come up with next. The Favorite, Killing of a Sacred Deer and Poor Things are all excellent films, and yet none can beat The Lobster in my eyes.

Poor Things the Lobster is based on a novel of the same name, although as far as I know the two are similar only in name and basic premise. In the film, we follow Godwin Baxter, a sort of deformed Dr. Frankenstein, who creates Bella Baxter by reviving a corpse. He teaches Bella about language, cognitive functions, and more through his experiments, and she learns incredibly quickly, soon wanting to go on adventures after becoming charmed by Mark Ruffalo’s Duncan Wedderburn. What follows is an adventure of self-discovery filled with strange and poignant twists on real-world locations, characters that challenge Bella’s worldview, butterscotch tarts, and lots of graphic sex.

I mean Very Apart from sex. It’s best not to limit this to your parents at Christmas, even though critics say it’s a cautionary tale about life. This also does not mean that the critics are wrong. Poor Things is full of hope about life, about people and their ability to improve. Bella Baxter is pure, a blank slate who refuses to see the worst in people, even though she has proven time and again that she has no desire to improve. She is childlike in this regard, and yet despite maturing throughout the film, she never loses her desire to do whatever she can to help people.

It’s a character concept that could have easily become overbearing or annoying, but Emma Stone is excellent as Bella Baxter. She manages to bring the childhood and adult elements of this experience to life in an incredibly believable way. At times effortlessly funny and heartbreaking, she is a standout protagonist in this story. It’s clear she’s worked with Lanthimos before, as she easily takes on dialogue that might sound awkward in the mouths of other actors. There’s a certain delay to it, an almost intangible quality that you’ll only notice if you’re wearing something else. This is more obvious in Lanthimos’s other films, but it’s still a welcome presence here.

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Stone’s supporting roles are largely consistent with her standards. Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, and the amazing Margaret Qualley all help bring out this strange version of our own world with limited screen time in some cases. Unfortunately, I didn’t find the same warmth in Mark Ruffalo’s performance. Ruffalo isn’t bad here, far from it, this is one of his best performances. Call it a personal dislike if you want, but I can’t get over the fact that Mark Ruffalo, like Dwayne Johnson and Will Smith, appears as himself in every movie. Whatever his character, I don’t imagine him as a completely different person. For me, it’s usually Mark Ruffalo playing a guy who is just too disruptive for immersion. It doesn’t help that his British accent is terrible. Sure, maybe it’s supposed to be so bad, but when Ruffalo gets a laugh, it still bothers me.

As I said at the beginning of this review, even after watching Poor Things I could see that it was Lanthimos’s best work in terms of the cinematography, the story he put together (except for some slow pace at the beginning), and The actors did not get the same feeling from the performance they received. As Lanthimos’ popularity grows, it becomes bolder in some ways, but in other respects it feels like the film was made for a wider audience. Not people who watch one MCU movie a year, but people who consider themselves movie lovers because they dared to watch Parasite with subtitles after it won an Oscar. This isn’t to take anything away, but I just feel like Poor Things was lacking something pure and unapologetic that kept it from being great in my eyes. The film is still excellent and worth a recommendation if you haven’t seen it yet, but at least for me the feeling wasn’t there, and I keep beating myself up as to why.