'Poor Things' Succeeds Past Its Perversions
It's not a Yorgos Lanthimos film if you don't self-exclaim "what the f**k" on more than one occasion. Poor Things is a disturbing comedy about humanity's primal instincts. Between sexualization and violence, Lanthimos creates a Frankenstein tale where the monster is the soul of all men and women in the film. The notions of right and wrong are put on full display in a story about the morals of recreating life. If you think you've seen all the Frankenstein stories, you haven't seen anything yet.
Poor Things does not limit its shocking moments. In fact, there are more appalling moments as the film goes from one terrible incident to the next. Yorgos Lanthimos doesn't hold back his taste for the twisted, as the entire film acts as a bizarre experiment. I would expect nothing less from the director of The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and The Favourite. Poor Things isn't Mr. Lanthimos' first dive into reanimation. He played with the idea in The Lobster, where a society of people choose to reincarnate themselves into an animal they see fit. For Colin Ferell's character, it was a lobster. In this film, a dead woman is brought back to life with an undeveloped brain. Because of her adolescent mind, Bella (Emma Stone) learns about the pains and pleasures of life the same way a grown infant would.
Bella kills innocent animals for pleasure and stabs the eyes out of corpses that her creator, Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), experiments on. Dr. Godwin very unsubtly goes by the nickname "God." Once more, Willem Dafoe chooses to be in a film that's in black and white, where he's required to play the role of a madman. Unlike The Lighthouse, Dafoe isn't required to shout or fight. Instead, he's one of the calmest characters in a film featuring bombastic, insane people. The only one who seems relatively sane in the picture is Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef). McCandles acts as the moral high ground. He doesn't lose control nor act upon his instincts. He's an assistant to God, tracking all the notes on his progress and assisting in his experiments.
For some reason, out of nowhere, Max develops a love for Bella as his affection for Bella arrives too quickly in the narrative. At one moment, he fears Bella for her murderous actions, and then the next, he loves her. Why? Is it lust, curiosity, or both? When it comes to desire, this Frankenstein story dissects sex and the feelings it brings. However, it's almost too centered on sex. A good chunk of the movie features Bella having affairs with many, many men. I've lost track of how many times I've seen Emma Stone remove her wardrobe and get rammed by some guy.
Such a ludicrous amount of sex intends to convey our animalistic instincts. We act as a polite society in public, removed from sex. We don't bring it up as it's a taboo subject to mention, although it's the most natural thing we do. For Bella, she learns how sex is pure desire and not love. She cheats on her fiance constantly as she's developing a keen awareness of the difference between sex and love. From her sexual escapades, Bella discovers there isn't much of a difference between the two actions. Even if you love someone, your lover can't please you the way others might if you let them. Why the film spends a good amount of its time on that subject feels more perverted than meaningful.
I think the meaning behind all the sex is to say we're animals who require sexual release no matter how polite we act in public. The only problem is that the message gets banged over the head way too much, where the film becomes more of a zombie sex show than anything substantial. What's more impressive than the sex is the film's style.
Yargos Lanthimos makes an obscure picture that's aesthetically offbeat to put you in the mindset of Bella. The film starts in color with a backdrop of a vast sky and ocean. The background looks fake but is intentionally designed that way to make the viewer feel like they're looking at a midcentury painting. After the picture's opening, the film stays in black and white when spending its time in God's mansion. The black and white is meant to resemble the uncertainty Bella feels when her brain is just developing. Much of the mansion is filmed with a wide fisheye lens as if we're looking into something we shouldn't be seeing. It's shot much like a heightened Stanley Kubrick film where the variable zoom lens is utilized to convey information to the audience. It zooms out at certain moments to reveal extra details within God's mansion, making it feel like a prison Bella wants to break free from.
When entering the second act of the picture, the film switches to color, representing Bella's freedom from God's grounds. The set dressing looks like something from Disneyworld to show how Bella sees the world. With a child's brain switched in her head, Bella can see the world for what it is—a phony place for "civilized society" to feel at peace. The buildings in Paris look flimsy, almost cardboard-like. It's as if Bella can see beyond the hypocrisy of polite society when she notices an ugly truth. We're all animals that want to fornicate or be fornicated. We screw and kill. The large architecture we create is a mere distraction from the caged animals that we are.
How effectively Lathomos conveys his message of civilized people being nothing more than animals that have certain impulses they can't restrain is slightly overstated. Themes of sexual repression, hypocrisy, demanding partners, and man's need to play God are made halfway through the film until the narrative drags on beyond the points it makes. Still, there's no denying that Yorgos Lanthimos is exceptional at building films that stick with you far after they end.
Aside from shocking you, Lathimos wants you to think about what the hell his film means after seeing it. For this old critic, Yorgos could spend some time in the editing room chopping twenty minutes of Bella's sex scenes. It's best not to beat a dead horse or lobster, whichever you prefer, with a stick. There's no doubt that what I saw has stuck with me. It's refreshing to see a filmmaker challenge their audience in ways other directors are afraid to that's distinctly his voice. In what may be Yorgos Lanthimos' most bizarre film with wacky imagery, a scene-stealing performance from Emma Stone, and creative production design, Poor Things is a journey to the world of insanity I wouldn't mind revisiting.
