Poor Things
First screened and reviewed in December 2023
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos. Cast: Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo, Ramy Youssef, Vicki Pepperdine, Jerrod Carmichael, Hanna Schygulla, Kathryn Hunter, Suzy Bemba, Christopher Abbott, Margaret Qualley. Screenplay: Tony McNamara (based on the novel by Alasdair Gray).

Photo © 2023 Searchlight Pictures / Element / Film4
I promise I show up wanting to like things. And I am always excited by a new Yorgos Lanthimos film, and I am jazzed that Emma Stone is so turned on by freaky art, and I love when any movie this strange is packing theaters and getting reviews all the way from raves to denunciations. Poor Things doesn't play things safe, and nor does anybody involved, and you gotta hype that up. Anything could happen.

But then so little actually does.

I do not think this script has anything to say, which wouldn't matter as much if it didn't frequently clear its throat to Say Something, and sound so quarter-assed about it. Patriarchy so bad! Socialism is what all the rad girls are into! Clitoridectomy is a BIG NO-NO, especially for its notorious targets, newly landowning white-girl aristocrats! I of course don't think Poor Things is a "message movie" or really wants to be one, but it shows a marked and anti-Dogtooth resistance to just being weird as fuck and leaving the takeaways to the audience to work out, even as we likely receive diametrically different messages. Every time the script seemed to puff up its chest about being, say, a Paean to Female Empowerment, it came across as desperate, as if Poor Things were ill-at-ease about being the tonally unsettling, ideologically inscrutable oddball infantilist sex-romp picaresque that it is. Imagine hoisting your freak flag but getting nervous and pinning some breast cancer ribbons to it, and maybe an ad for a missing child, but then the missing kid has a cartoon mustache, because we didn't mean to seem serious.

Again, none of this would matter if Poor Things were getting the job done as the singularly strange enterprise it is: Steampunk Nell, as staged by the Wooster Group. But as executed, even with all the free-thinking artistry in the world, it felt dead in the water. I saw the kind of project that gives a regional theater manager acid reflux, knowing that tomorrow she'll have to tell her whole ensemble that this avant-garde, genderfucked physical theater semi-farce they devised at the retreat, and into which they have poured their whole hearts, is sadly not fit to mount, not even the rando dance sequence they're all attached to, not even for a preview audience. We can start at the visual level: the production design is full of eye-catching flourishes in the interiors and exteriors alike, but not only do the outsides and alleged insides of key spaces have nothing to do with each other, there's no uniting aesthetic at all. Right from that ostensible baseline, it feels like anything goes. There are no rules in Poor Things, less in the spirit of invigorating chaos than of everybody and everything starting at square one with each location, each new sequence, every tableau. Some of the costumes are wild fun, especially the bonkers silhouettes of Emma Stone's clothes, but just as often they look like overworked bids for outré attention, without the story-serving function or aesthetic cohesion that Sandy Powell brought to The Favourite, Lanthimos's last, gonzo period/antiperiod outing.

Now, the acting. Having heard so many raves about Stone, I was not prepared for her performance to feel so uneven and sometimes amateur in its evocation of childish impulse or bodily discombobulation or autoerotic euphoria. She's really trying, and Emma Stone is never less than watchable—even under that wig, which suggests The Ring restaged on the Moors. But I think the part of Bella really needed a fearlessly physical dyed-in-the-wool theater animal to pull it off. Stone's not restless enough, not unnerving enough, and maybe because she is such a rapt and generous listener as an actor, she has a hard time telegraphing the ruthless and infantile self-fascination of the toddler she's basically playing. Poor Things could use some danger amid all the overworked whimsy and tacky, effulgent world-building, and Stone can't provide it, or not consistently enough. She hasn't transformed herself or her way of relating to costars or cameras the way Foster did in Nell or Thandie Newton did in Beloved; even if you consider those turns lamentable follies, as I do not, they pull their entire films and entire audiences into their weird-as-shit frequencies in a way Stone doesn't. She's taking big risks as an artist, but she also still feels like she's hedging, or working too far from type.

Even that is much preferable to whatever Mark Ruffalo is doing as the caddish, undeservedly arrogant cocksman who becomes Bella's increasingly cruel and tiresome opponent. Ruffalo lacks either the zany comic eccentricity or the persuasive foulness of spirit that this role needs to really juice the movie. But the biggest problem is that he constantly seems like, I don't know, he just got the sides yesterday. He's flailing for a character here, doing way too much sometimes and not nearly enough in others. On the rare occasions he hits things just right, the camera is placed in the worst spot to abet performance, keyed instead to showing off art direction or to flaunting some ocular gimmick (fish-eye lenses, tight irises, black-and-white photography that looks like T-shirt screen printing), so even his potentially inspired moments fall flat. I want all good things for Mark Ruffalo, but the buzz attaching to this woeful turn really has me asking questions. He makes Stone look confident and polished, but then Jerrod Carmichael shows up to make Ruffalo look perfectly fine, and I can't even talk about that.

Poor Things also feels about five hours long, and I swear it's because of the sound design. When Lanthimos and composer Jerskin Fendrix (!) aren't goosing us or jump-scaring us with their sudden bursts of brief, dense atonality, which is sporadically quite effective, the mix of this movie is as flat as the landscape around Asteroid City. Two and a half hours of mostly dead air. Not even room noise, or crowd clamor, or lapping waves when you think those textures would be defaults for whole chapters of the story. The air in Poor Things sounds like the atmosphere stagnating in the theater when an imaginative but lethally maladroit play is bombing, which only reinforces the impression that we're watching exactly that.

I'm almost glad we don't give up the ghost earlier, because Christopher Abbott brings to the surprising last act the blend of farcical energy and poison-tipped menace that Poor Things has badly needed throughout. The script is at peak Point Scoring mode by this point, but from Abbott, I'll take it. The exchanges between him and Stone feel halfway alive in a way too much does not. Even Bella's climactic coming into knowledge of key facts about her origin story, which should massively and permanently destabilize the character, just slides off the screen as a perfunctory plot beat, even if it gives us another chance for a pre-converted choir to sneer at The Evil Men Do. Abbott brings some charge, in other words, to the movie's superficially loopy but basically market-tested antichauvinism. His comeuppance is fun but it's way too little, way too late.

By that point, Willem Dafoe is getting an awfully dewy sendoff for such a piece-of-shit amoral opportunist, Stone's Bella Baxter is girlbossing in a Victorian lawn chair, and the set is once more a hodgepodge of bracing details, synthetic textures, and unpleasing colors (just like on the ship, just like in the brothel, just like in the lecture hall, just like in "Egypt"). The mise-en-scène is littered with mad-scientist animals like a duck with a cat's four-legged body, and damn if those critters aren't cute, scurrying around in corners of the frame, getting laughs in part because they aren't lunging for them. I'm tempted to raise this review half a notch just for them.

Meanwhile, though, the movie itself is the biggest, weirdest platypus of them all, but with no agility with that improbable body, no pacing or momentum, no actorly charisma or compellingly clear characterization, no satisfying wrap-up to 150 minutes of heavy, busy narrative. I've loved Lanthimos movies, I've argued with them, I've laughed, I've empathized, I've sensed with regret but also rooting interest when solid premises run out of narrative or conceptual steam. But I never thought I'd see a Lanthimos movie that, for all its eye-popping outfits and frantic quasi-provocations and planetary circumnavigations, just... sits there. Poor thing. Grade: C–

(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd.)

Academy Award Nominations and Winners:
Best Picture
Best Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
★Best Actress: Emma Stone
Best Supporting Actor: Mark Ruffalo
Best Adapted Screenplay: Tony McNamara
Best Cinematography: Robbie Ryan
★Best Production Design: James Price, Shona Heath, and Zsuzsa Mihalek
★Best Costume Design: Holly Waddington
Best Film Editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis
Best Original Score: Jerskin Fendrix
★Best Makeup & Hairstyling: Nadia Stacey, Mark Coulier, and Josh Weston

Golden Globe Nominations and Winners:
★Best Picture (Musical/Comedy)
Best Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
★Best Actress (Musical/Comedy): Emma Stone
Best Supporting Actor: Willem Dafoe
Best Supporting Actor: Mark Ruffalo
Best Screenplay: Tony McNamara
Best Original Score: Jerskin Fendrix

Other Awards:
Venice Film Festival: Golden Lion (Best Film)
Los Angeles Film Critics Association: Best Lead Performance (Stone; tied with Sandra Hüller for Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest); Best Cinematography
Chicago Film Critics Association: Best Actress (Stone); Best Costume Design
National Board of Review: Best Supporting Actor (Ruffalo); Best Adapted Screenplay
British Academy Awards (BAFTAs): Best Actress (Stone); Best Production Design; Best Costume Design; Best Makeup & Hair; Best Visual Effects (Simon Hughes, Tim Barter, Dean Koonjul, and Jane Paton)
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