I am a big fan of Yorgos Lanthimos’ work. Like many people, I discovered his films with the weird, silly, and unpleasant The Lobster, and since then I eagerly await each of his subsequent films to see what he might do next. The Favourites, Killing of a Sacred Deer and Poor Things are all excellent films, and yet nothing beats The Lobster in my eyes.
Poor Things the Lobster is based on the novel of the same name, although as far as I know the two are similar in name and basic premise. In the film, we follow Godwin Baxter, a sort of perverted Dr. There is Frankenstein who reanimates a corpse to create Bella Baxter. He teaches Bella about language, cognitive functions, and more through his experiments, and she learns very quickly, soon wanting to go on adventures after being charmed by Mark Ruffalo’s Duncan Wedderburn. An adventure of self-discovery filled with strange and moving twists on real-world locations, characters who challenge Bella’s worldview, butterscotch tarts, and lots of graphic sex.
I mean a lot About sex, moreover. This one isn’t the best to stick with your parents at Christmas, even though critics say it’s a cautionary tale about life. That doesn’t mean the critics are wrong either. Poor things are full of hope about life, about people, and about their ability to improve. Bella Baxter is pure, a blank slate who refuses to see the worst in people, even when they prove time and time again that they have no desire to improve. She is childlike in this regard, and although she matures throughout the film, she never loses sight of her desire to do whatever she can to help people.
It’s a character concept that could easily be overbearing or annoying, but Emma Stone is simply outstanding as Bella Baxter. She manages to bring the childhood and adult elements of this experience to life in an incredibly believable way. Effortlessly funny and heartbreaking, she is an exceptional protagonist in this story. It’s clear she’s worked with Lanthimos before, as she easily tackles dialogue that might be clunky in the mouths of other actors. There’s a certain delay, an almost intangible quality that you’ll only notice when you put something else on. It’s more obvious in Lanthimos’ other films, but it’s still a welcome presence here.
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Stone’s supporting roles are mostly based on his standards. Willem Dafoe, Remy Youssef and the astonishing Margaret Qualey all help flesh out this strange version of our own world with limited screen time in some cases. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the same warmth for 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 to be himself in every movie. Whatever his character is, I can’t imagine him as a completely different person. For me, it’s usually just Mark Ruffalo playing a man, which is quite disruptive to immersion. It doesn’t help that his British accent is pretty bad. Arguably, maybe it’s supposed to be that bad, but it still cracks me up when Ruffalo laughs.
As I said at the beginning of this review, watching Poor Things I could see that it was Lanthimos’ best work in terms of the cinematography, the story he put together (minus the first letdown), and the performances he got out of it. Actors, the same feeling was not there. As Lanthimos’s popularity grows, it becomes bolder in some ways, but in others 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 buffs because they dared to watch Parasite with subtitles after it won an Oscar. This isn’t to exclude anything, but I feel like something pure and inauthentic is missing from the poor stuff, which keeps it from being great in my eyes. The movie is still great and worth recommending if you haven’t seen it yet, but the emotion just wasn’t there, at least for me, and I kept asking myself why.
