Until the last 30 minutes of the 18+ rated two-hour movie, I did not realise what Yorgos Lanthimos, the director, was doing with the movie. And that naivete cannot be attributed solely to my birdbrain; I was blinded by the unreasonable number of sex scenes, cunnilingus, and explicit anatomical dissections of human bodies. But don’t be alarmed; the scenes are nothing more than what any of us already watch in private, with both the volume and brightness of our very smartphones cranked down to the lowest level.
Plot
Godwin Baxter is an eccentric anatomy professor who finds dead and pregnant Victoria Blessington washed up on a river shore. While Victoria is dead, the foetus inside her is still alive. Baxter fancies himself a demi-god of sorts and does the “most obvious” thing, according to him: he transplants the infant’s brain into Victoria’s head and renames her Bella. So, while Bella is a grown adult in appearance, mentally she is childlike. With the help of Mrs. Prim, the helper, Baxter owns and monitors Bella’s every movement: what she eats and drinks, her entertainment, when and how often she can go outside – exactly like a parent would their child.
Bella, being an infant with the motor functions of a fully grown woman, does what any toddler with unsupervised access to a body that strong would do: she breaks things, publicly touches herself in rather private parts without a flicker of shame, and discovers that a few well-coordinated hand movements in her now not-so-private part feel pleasant. Baxter, ever the “concerned father,” hires Max McCandles to record her progress and eventually proposes marriage to lock the whole arrangement down, which is its own quiet horror if you sit with it for longer than the film allows you to.
Enter Duncan Wedderburn, a lawyer as vain as he is horny, who Bella seduces (or is seduced by, depending on who you ask, though the film is fairly unambiguous about who’s actually in control) into whisking her away from Baxter’s house to see the world. What follows is a tour of Lisbon, a cruise ship, Alexandria, and eventually Paris, where Bella works in a brothel not out of desperation but curiosity, treating sex work the way she treats everything else, as data collection. By the time she returns to London, she is by no means an infant. She has been groomed, to fulfil the warped desires of the men who ‘admire’ her.
The Title
Poor Things as a title earns its place, the title lends itself to various interpretations. The most obvious might evoke sympathy, “poor thing” is what you would murmur over someone pitiable, and the film opens with Bella as exactly that—a reanimated corpse-infant with no say in her own existence, assembled by a man who calls himself God. Additionally, Baxter tells Max that she suffered a brain injury at a young age, so, for the most part, you think Bella is an unfortunate victim of God’s plan, which she possibly is, if you take into account who ‘God’ is in the film.. Also, “poor things” can easily be read or understood to be dismissive as opposed to compassionate. If we observe the way in which both Baxter and Duncan talk about Bella in a manner they perceive to be compassionate. The two men pity her, infantilise her, and decide what’s best for her, all under the cover of concern.
The title, in effect- can be understood to be offering sympathy, which can also be interpreted as condescension. Towards the end, when Bella is far from what one could classify a “poor” thing, she is rather more capable, clear minded and somewhat in control, than any of the men who groomed her or wanted her – the title then shifts and can be read in a more sarcastic tone. It’s less a description of Bella and more an indicative of how the men around her chose to see her.
There is also a plural slyness to it. ‘Poor Things,’ and not ‘Poor Thing, shows that the title is not just about Bella. Baxter, hollowed by his own father’s experiments, is too a poor thing. Duncan, undone by wanting something he can’t control, is a poor thing too. Even Victoria Blessington, the woman whose body in which this ‘social experiment’ started, is erased and repurposed without consent, is also a ‘poor thing.’ The title extends the pity around until it stops being pity and starts being a condition, a misdiagnosed condition perhaps. Everyone in the film is a casualty of someone else’s God complex.
Cinematography
Visually, the film cheats a little, and I mean that as a compliment. The first act is shot in a warped, almost fisheye black-and-white that makes Baxter’s house feel like the inside of a skull, which, considering Bella’s brain is quite literally borrowed, tracks. The moment she boards the ship to leave London, the film blooms into colour, garish and theatrical, like the world itself has been waiting for her to notice it. It’s an unsubtle trick, the kind that would embarrass a lesser film, but Lanthimos commits so fully that it works anyway.
The fisheye distortion, though, is not just aesthetic flourish; it’s a constant reminder that you are looking at Bella through a warped, artificial apparatus. A ‘normal’ film about a woman’s sexual awakening would shoot her body in a way that invites you to forget the camera is there. Lanthimos does the opposite: the lens bends the frame so aggressively that it does not allow you to forget that you’re watching through lense, which keeps nudging you toward ‘who’s doing the watching here, and why?’ instead of just watching.
Cast
Emma Stone carries the film on pure physical commitment. Bella’s walk alone goes through three distinct evolutions over a period of two hours, from the stiff, newborn stagger to a somewhat looser, relaxed walk, more feral, more hers. It’s a performance built from the neck down before it’s built from the neck up, which is the correct choice for a character whose entire arc is about a body outpacing the mind installed in it, and then the mind catching up and demanding to function at its optimum capacity. Willem Dafoe, buried under prosthetic scarring, plays Godwin with a tenderness that keeps yoyos between being menacing at times then back again towards tenderness, while Mark Ruffalo, as Duncan, depicts the most enjoyable unravelling in the film: a man who mistook a woman’s naivete as a permanent state of being and and as such cannot cope with her blooming out of the shell he created around her.
My Thoughts
Watching Bella’s arc unfold, I kept waiting for the film to punish her for it, the way most films punish women who want too much, feel too much, or have sex too freely. It never does. And that, I think, is the whole point Lanthimos is smuggling in underneath the fisheye lenses and the cunnilingus: Poor Things is not a movie about a woman’s sexual awakening; it’s a movie about ownership, and who gets to revoke it once you realise the thing you built has opinions of its own.
The film wants credit for being radical about female desire while still filtering that desire through a male director’s lens and a script adapted from an author who is a man. Also, there’s a version of this critique that says the film is less revolutionary than it thinks it is, that it mistakes explicitness for insight. I don’t think that fully lands, mostly because the film seems aware of the irony and leans into it rather than pretending it isn’t there.
A fitting example is how the film treats the men who desire her. Baldiwn, Duncan, Alfie (the man Victoria [Bella] was married to), none of their desire is shot as aspirational or cool. Duncan, in particular, gets progressively more pathetic and unhinged the more he wants to possess her. His lust is shown in the film as cringeworthy and comedic, as opposed to hot and fiery. If the film wanted you to simply enjoy Bella the way these men do, it wouldn’t sabotage its own leading men like that.
And Bella’s attitude does a lot of work to lean on the irony, too. She talks about sex, cunnilingus, and orgasm in a flat, almost clinical manner. She calls them “furious jumping,” “tongue play,” and “happiness,” respectively. Masturbation is correspondingly “making happiness.” That strips the scenes of the expected erotic framing. You can’t really get swept up in something the character herself describes like a lab experiment. But it’s worth giving the film a go, before you write it off as a feminist masterpiece, like I already have.
The End
Unlike the Gods of old, Godwin cannot escape mortality. Cancer proves him a mere man, and he dies. Bella, meanwhile, has mastered the art of human dissection and, in a sense, succeeded her ‘maker’. She is later shown as a lecturer on human anatomy and who pursues her own experiments, including one particularly fitting project: replacing her former husband’s brain with that of a goat.
So, by the time the credits rolled, I understood what I’d missed for the first ninety minutes: this film was never really about the sex. It was about watching someone groom and build a person the way you’d train and groom a pet, and then having to live with the fact that the pet grew a spine. This is parallel to how society sets the right way for a woman to behave and punishes them when they deviate from the “right” way of doing things. But this is not that movie; the punishment never comes. So, if you ask me, Poor Things earns its ending, and more importantly, it earns the discomfort it lets you soak in to get there.
