Poor Things

Scott Hardie: “It ruled.”

If this does well at the Academy Awards in a couple of months, it's going to be one of the stranger films to win big recently, and I'm saying that a year after the Best Picture winner with hot-dog fingers. Poor Things is a nauseatingly weird movie, but it has to be, in order to make its stomach-turning premise plausible, which in turn allows it to make its condemnations matter. Without spoiling any plot details, let's simply say that this is a dark comedy about a woman with a cognitive impairment related to medical experimentation, who spends her life being trapped by men who enjoy their power over her. The film can be heavy-handed in making its points -- by the time the final controlling man entered her life, I was ready to throw up my hands and "enough already, we got it" -- but if you give more than a moment's thought to the woman's true nature, you start to think that the film is in fact far too gentle in condemning this sort of terrible man, whose crimes are much worse than the movie acknowledges and which have very unhappy endings in the real world.

The movie is a huge achievement by nearly every department, with a feast of detail in its costumes and production design. The cast is excellent, with Mark Ruffalo and especially Emma Stone pulling off incredibly challenging performances that risk making them look like ridiculous laughing stocks if the chemistry is off. The level of trust placed in director Yorgos Lanthimos by everyone involved is impressive, and he pulls it all off, one astonishing sequence after another.

As to the success of the film's thematic elements, well, let's just say that I feel very under-qualified to judge. I'm a man, the director is a man, the screenwriter is a man who adapted this from a novel by a man, and so on. We can imagine the main character's feelings and try to judge what the film is saying about her quest of self-liberation and self-actualization, but I'd much prefer to see a version of this made by women who understand the meaning more immediately. (For one thing, Stone's protagonist rarely seems alarmed or troubled by the danger that men put her in; her matter-of-fact responses to threats feel like they were written by people who have never faced male violence.) Some female critics adore the film; Christie Lemire called it tbe best of the year. On the other hand, my wife Kelly hated it, both the stomach-turning implications of its sexual relationships and the more immediate grossness of its visuals; she vomited twice and walked out on the last half-hour. This is certainly not for everyone, so you might want to skip it if you're squeamish about cinematic sex or violence, but I don't think anyone can say that it has not done a tremendous amount of work towards understanding its themes or realizing its world.

− December 31, 2023 • more by Scott • log in or create an account to reply