Australasian Cinema > reviews >
Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023) Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe; young woman brought back to life by unorthodox scientist
Peter Bradshaw:
That cooing note of kindness and pity in the title is misleading – in fact, there is pure vivisectional ruthlessness in this toweringly bizarre epic. Poor Things is a steampunk-retrofuturist Victorian freakout and macabre black-comic horror, adapted by screenwriter Tony McNamara from the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray and directed by the absurdist virtuoso Yorgos Lanthimos. Lanthimos shows us an extraordinary, artificial, contorted world, partly shot in monochrome, sometimes bulging out at us through a fish-eye lens, elsewhere lit from within in richly saturated tones, like an engraved colour plate. The Guardian.
I see this a European 'idea' or 'what-if?' film, and, more specifically, as something I'm still thinking of as a 'wild child' story (not having yet thought of a better name). The monster in Frankenstein is archetypal, but the title is misleading, as many ppl think the monster is called Frankenstein. Not necessarily the first film, but the most convenient because of its title, Truffaut's L'enfant sauvage (1970) presents a being who is not at all socialised for some reason, and has to learn, for example, how to speak and behave when among people. A similar (but much better) work is Werner Herzog's Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (1974; distributed in English-speaking territories as The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser). Lesser-known examples are to be found in Australia in the work of Rolf de Heer: Bad Boy Bubby (1993), Epsilon (1997, Alien Visitor) and perhaps also his Survival of Kindness (2022).
The idea is partly the curiosity involved in dealing with primitivity, but mostly provides a way to look afresh at human society.
Yorgos Lanthimos had already investigated this idea in Dogtooth (2009), in which a man keeps his children isolated from society (which he tells them will kill them) and imprisoned on the family estate. In this 2023 film, he has a foetal brain put into its (dead) mother's skull as another way of experimenting with socialisation, and indeed the whole of mental growth.
Is it a good film? It's overwhelming: look at all the adjectives in the quotation from Peter Bradshaw at the top! One thing everyone agrees about: Mark Ruffalo is so bad he almost ruins the whole thing.
IMDb page.
Wikipedia page.
Other films directed by Yorgos Lanthimos include: Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2015), The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), The Favourite (2018).
Garry Gillard | New: 2 January, 2024 | Now: 28 February, 2024