I’ve enjoyed pretty much all of Yorgos Lanthimos’ films (Kinetta is a bit of black sheep for me, but it has its interesting moments). Dogtooth, The Lobster, and The Favourite are all in my personal top 10 from their respective years. Alps and Killing of a Sacred Deer intrigue me enough that rewatches could easily lift them into top 10 lists of their own. Lanthimos makes exciting and unique films. He has a fantastic grasp of tone and morbid humor. And he pulls great performances out of his casts. Although Poor Things is imperfect, it checks all of these boxes, as well.

Poor Things is something of a libertine Frankenstein story. In Victorian England, a surgeon called God (short for Godwin Baxter) tasks a young medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) with teaching one of his science experiments. God (Willem Dafoe), a man scarred and physically ailed by the experiments his father practiced on his body, has created a woman, Bella (Emma Stone), from the body of a deceased woman and the brain of that woman’s unborn child. This macabre surgery resulted in a woman with the “mind of an infant,” a blank slate brimming with curiosity and a desire to see the outside world.

Bella agrees to marry Max, but she is soon whisked away by the boorish Duncan (Mark Ruffalo), who promises to show her the world. Duncan’s plan is to exploit her for sex, but Bella instead exploits him for his means (and for sex). As she embarks on transnational travel (from Lisbon to Alexandria to Paris), she learns about the many ideological schools of thought that govern modern society. She comes of age by way of philosophy, as it were, while simultaneously pushing back against the constraints of bourgeois respectability politics.

The conceit of Poor Things is straightforward to a fault. The ideas in the film are not revolutionary or particularly profound, but they are presented through the story of Bella in a way that is engaging (it helps that Stone is giving a fantastic performance). And the film’s aesthetic is beautiful, with intricate production design and slick cinematography that bounces between black and white and full color. The execution hits the mark, even as certain narrative moments falter.

These moments are few and far between, but they stood out in my viewing. The Jerrod Carmichael-led sequence regarding poverty and cynicism is a major fumble (it is also the most visually off sequence in the film). The extended brothel segment is too extended for what it ultimately delivers. The inclusion of a second human experiment in the form of Margaret Qualley is an unnecessary subplot that does not develop. And the marriage plot itself, which drives the story toward its conclusion, is slightly antithetical to Bella’s overall arc of emancipation from the normative constraints of society.

Still, Lanthimos delivers his usual brand of idiosyncratic dark comedy filmmaking. Poor Things is visually sumptuous and consistently intriguing. As far as Oscar contenders go, it is about as weird as a fan of weird movies could hope for.

Poor Things: B+

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)