“Nothing but sugar and violence” is Bella Baxter’s verdict on the outside world: a space with which she is, despite her adult form and sexuality, as freshly acquainted as any newborn. The heroine of Yorgos Lanthimos’s extraordinary new film Poor Things, Bella is a woman with a mind far newer than her body. This wild Victorian fantasia, adapted from Alasdair Gray’s 1992 comic novel by way of Frankenstein, Pygmalion and various myths of creation and recreation, will gradually show how that disparity came to be – though Poor Things’ many secrets are best revealed in its own time, on its own unruly terms.
However it came to pass, Bella’s condition has granted her a perspective at once naive and bluntly wise. She sees the world and its fellow inhabitants simply but expansively: “sugar” covers a spectrum of delights from fine patisserie to ruffled couture to sexual intercourse (or, to use her own exhilarated description, “furious jumping”), undercut by manifestations of violence spanning misogyny, social inequality and, well, sexual intercourse once more. Both profound and absurd, disturbing and darkly hilarious and ultimately, strangely, joyful, Poor Things is itself a construction of sugar and violence, pitting humanity’s basest impulses against its most wondrous possibilities – a unique fusion of art’s highest and lowest pleasures that has already landed it the Golden Lion for Best Film at last year’s Venice Film Festival and, at last week’s Golden Globe Awards, the award for Best Picture (Comedy or Musical). A handsome pile of Oscar nominations surely awaits.
The film’s breadth and complexity is no surprise coming from Lanthimos, the iconoclastic Greek film-makers who first burrowed into art house filmgoers’ nightmares in 2009 with his pitch-black, Oscar-nominated arrested-development comedy Dogtooth. Once identified as the leader of cinema’s so-called Greek Weird Wave, Lanthimos has since brought his provocative, cockeyed sensibility to English-language cinema – and more specifically to Ireland, where, in collaboration with Irish production company Element Pictures’ Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe, he has developed The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Favourite. Poor Things marks their fourth and most extravagant collaboration yet: a surreal period epic that, while principally shot in Hungary, hops narratively from London to Lisbon to Alexandria to Paris, each city visualised as a baroque, colour-saturated dream of itself, each presenting a surfeit of temptations and traps to Bella on her vast coming-of-age voyage.
Bella is played by Emma Stone, now the superstar Hollywood partner in Lanthimos and Element’s Greco-Irish alliance. Then a recent Oscar winner for her beguiling musical turn in La La Land, the American actress first worked with the director on 2018′s The Favourite, adopting a perfectly cut-glass English accent to play Abigail Masham, the crafty social climber who seduces Olivia Colman’s unhinged Queen Anne in a deliciously queer imagining of royal intrigue. With Poor Things, however, Stone steps into the role of producer as well as star, thus providing herself with the leading role of a lifetime: a woman who is multiple ages and mindsets at once, learning how to move, think and feel before our very eyes.
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Physically kinetic and mentally unpredictable, Bella is the richest showcase yet for Stone’s elastic gifts as a screen comedienne – winning her Best Actress at the Golden Globes. It’s not a one-woman show: Poor Things is packed with ripe, ribald performances from a top-flight supporting cast, including Willem Dafoe as Bella’s reclusive creator, Mark Ruffalo as her lecherous playboy beau and Kathryn Hunter as a Cockney brothel-madam mentor, but remains in thrall to its star throughout. Stone’s fearlessness meshes ideally with that of her director; what Lanthimos grants her in subversive edge, she repays him in daffy warmth. Their third feature together, Kinds of Kindness, has already completed production, set for a premiere later this year; one senses a major actor-director partnership in the making.
Stone, however, isn’t the only alumnus from The Favourite to return for Poor Things, helping Lanthimos craft the most technically ambitious and tonally quicksilver work of his career. Australian screenwriter Tony McNamara, the man who brought the wicked barbs to the 2018 film’s revisionist history, is back on sensational form, inventively adapting the densely folded literary trappings of Gray’s ingenious novel into a sweeping, fully cinematic hero’s journey, replete with mile-a-minute one-liners and a rousing, post-#MeToo feminist sensibility all its own.
Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan, too, is back, brilliantly visualising Bella’s growing, shifting perspective with a dizzy array of lenses and a palette that switches from high-contrast black-and-white to swirling oil-painting hues of ochre, cobalt and plum. Indeed, Poor Things is such a heady visual feast that the eye sometimes doesn’t know where to look first. James Price and Shona Heath’s ornate, digitally enhanced production design merges Art Nouveau glamour with steampunk escapism; Holly Waddington’s scrumptious costumes, mixing period frills and formality with Vivienne Westwood-like flourishes of juvenile punk, are already the subject of their own travelling exhibition.
Yet no detail in Poor Things feels redundant, for the sake of mere spectacle: its every sight and sound, including the offbeat intrusions of Jerskin Fendrix’s avant-garde score, fills in another piece of Bella Baxter’s evolving point of view, in turn presenting the viewer with new, vital ways of seeing. Nothing in the cinema today looks, feels or tastes quite like Poor Things, in all its sweet, violent, erotic, ecstatic excess.
Poor Things is in cinemas from today. For more and to book tickets see poorthingsfilm.ie