Emma Stone is suitably unsettling in this stirring feminist fable steeped in Victorian horror – The Irish Times

The original plan was to release the latest collaboration between Yorgos Lanthimos and Dublin’s Element Pictures a few days after its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival in September. Its emergence (as things are working out) will coincide with the film winning the Golden Lion and the concomitant explosion of publicity. Hot Take and Backlash wouldn’t have set up yet.

Well, that’s what the Hollywood actors’ strike was for. Poor Things, a stirring feminist fable steeped in the port-wine shadow of Victorian horror, now rides waves of praise and streams of chatter.

Sexual content has triggered a few hot flushes (especially in the United States). The oddly unaffected counterblast – Angelica Jade Bastian’s outspoken dissent to Vulture is worth reading – leaving you wondering if the film is as daring as some claim. Others have complained that the adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel strayed too far from its Scottish origins.

On balance, however, Poor Things — winner of best comedy or musical at the weekend’s Golden Globes — has weathered the winter well. It still looks as fresh and restless and busy and funny as it did before the leaves fell. Nothing so strong and exotic could hope to completely avoid decisive resistance.

Emma Stone, who did such a good job for Lanthimos in The Favourite, is appropriately unsettling as a woman who, after death, is reanimated with the next generation of her own DNA. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a totally-mad scientist, wounded and patched up in Hammer Horror fashion, pulls her body from the Thames, after being abused by the patriarchy, she takes her own life by soaking wet. Baxter implants the living brain of his unborn child into his capable skull and sets the result to grow into a new kind of free spirit.

We learn much of this information about 20 minutes into the film, the stage in which we are initially introduced to the clumsy, socially disengaged Bella Baxter (as Godwin “God” Baxter dubs our heroine). Shaw’s Pygmalion is a big deal in the story. Godwin and his assistant Max McCandless (Rami Youssef) pose as Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering, age-shifted on their way to awakening as Bella Toddlers.

We reach a crisis when moustache-twirling cad Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo with an uncertain English accent) arrives to capture Bella from the now infatuated McCandles.

( Yorgos Lanthimos: ‘Emma Stone came up with a lot of the sex stuff we did’ )

It can be considered a side tribute to the filmmakers to note that there’s so much headlong action and so much witty dialogue that it’s easy to forget that we’re dealing with Bella, for most of the time, as a sexualized young woman. She still has the mind of a child. He asks questions that a child might ask. When someone makes a euphemism at the dinner table, she blurts out, “Oh, you mean his penis!” (Definite nods to Pygmalion and My Fair Lady there.) Unease is certainly invited—a nod to gender power imbalances—but that shadow undermines some of the building humor.

However, as the film progresses, its scope increases. The pair shed light on enhanced versions of Lisbon, Alexandria and Paris that, while tending towards off-the-peg steampunk, confirmed the weakest stuff as the most ambitious collaboration between Element and Lanthimos, after hits like The Lobster and The Favourite. Robbie Ryan, one of Ireland’s most gifted cinematographers, uses fisheye lenses and circular frames to emphasize psychotrauma. Stone, often shot from below, deftly transitions from woman child to emotional genius with singular dexterity.

It’s a hazy feast of cinematic excess. But the project has intellectual traction and psychological tenacity. This is an essay on the politics of control expressed in the language of avant-garde circus. Though we’re never more than a second away from a good joke, and though the film has its compass set for a promising destination, Poor Things is haunted by the constant worry of male control elevating into violent abuse. This is as serious as comedies.

Poor Things previews in select cinemas; It opens on Friday, January 12th