Poor Things
A young woman (Emma Stone) is brought back to life by an eccentric Victorian doctor (Willem Dafoe). She escapes her confines in his house and runs off with Mark Ruffalo doing a mad English accent.
There’s something about Lanthimos films that never has me rushing to see them. Perhaps it’s the guarantee of some form of grotesque weirdness that I’m hardly ever in the mood for. And yet every time I sit down with one it’s an enjoyable, surprising experience that is never quite as gruelling as I’m anticipating.
Poor Things is another one I wish I’d seen sooner, if only because it is quite often laugh-out-loud funny instead of on-paper funny. It’s written by Tony McNamara who also wrote Lanthimos’ The Favourite and created a funny TV series called The Great, and here he also remembered to write real jokes. This is almost at odds with the fairly artsy pretensions the film has, with its oddball choice of lenses, terrible pacing and surrealist sets.
The set design and art direction are truly wonderful though. Having just seen The Thief of Bagdad1 I couldn’t help but think of its hand-painted technicolor masterworks and of other Powell and Pressburger films. The whole thing is like a beautiful dream, and I got sucked right into its world.
It’s also hard not to love every performance here. Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo charm their way through the most preposterous accents and it all just adds to the fever-dream style of the film. Emma Stone makes light work of an incredibly demanding role, changing ever so slightly with every scene until by the end she’s completely transformed.
I’m not sure it commits hard enough to any of the themes it wants to explore and as I said the pacing is a bit off-putting, and to be frank these are more than just little nitpicks. But something about Poor Things makes me want to overlook those reservations and just roll with it.
Maybe this Lanthimos guy has some potential.