Frankenstein's Baby

Film: Poor Things
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on various players.

I think it’s likely that everyone who is a film nerd has those few actors or directors that they don’t like that everyone else seems to. I’ve long maintained that Quentin Tarantino would be better if he stopped trying to be awesome and instead tried to just be good. I find myself in the same position with Yorgos Lanthimos. Everyone seems to love his work, and I don’t see it. I’ve delayed watching Poor Things for months because of this but simply can’t delay any longer. It’s the last of the 2023 Oscar movies I need to watch that I won’t have to pay for.

The positive news for me, though, is that with Poor Things I’ve figured out exactly what it is that I don’t like about Lanthimos. Seeing this, it seems so obvious that I don’t know why it took me this long to figure it out. Yorgos Lanthimos is the dark, alternate universe Wes Anderson, and now that I’ve typed it, I hate that fact even more.

Think about it, though. Wes Anderson is all about that sort of twee, incredibly stylized look, the precision of the sets, the specific color palette, and the quirk-filled and idiosyncratic characters. Lanthimos does much the same, but the quirkiness of his characters is darker and baser. Characters aren’t motivated by a strange collection or their family, but by baser instincts—sex, revenge, money. That’s always been the case, but none of Lanthimos’s work has looked so much like a dark universe version of Asteroid City as Poor Things.

It’s also worth saying that an old truth used to be that for men to win an Oscar, they had to play someone physically or mentally disabled. For women to win an Oscar, they had to play a prostitute. This film is not going to help with that, since Emma Stone won Best Actress for playing a character who is both mentally disabled in some way and also spends time as a prostitute. There’s also a surprising amount of nudity and sex in the film, and a lot of it is pretty unpleasant.

Anyway, we’re going to start with Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a horribly-scarred doctor, who has created a truly bizarre experiment. We learn over time that this has essentially been his entire life. His father performed horrible experiments on him throughout his life, and Baxter has taken it upon himself to continue bizarre experiments in his own right. He recruits medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) to help him look after the experiment in question.

That experiment is Bella (Emma Stone), who seems decidedly backward mentally and physically. Eventually, we learn there’s a reason for this. Some time previously, Godwin Baxter came into possession of the body of a pregnant woman who had just committed suicide. So, he removed the brain of the dead woman and replaced it with that of the baby, and then observed Bella’s infant brain attempt to adapt to an adult body. Max helps this observation, and because this takes place in a bizarre Victorian past, Max eventually falls in love with Bella despite her having the literal mind of a child.

Baxter plans to have Bella marry Max, but also decides that it can only happen with very specific safeguards in mind. He has a lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), draw up the contract that will essentially keep Bella a prisoner, but safe, and will allow her to continue to be observed. Wedderburn instead decides to run off with Bella, introduce her to sex, and see the world. Bella enjoys the sex, but also wants to explore more of the world. She has no social graces, and she wanders off, encounters other people, and eventually, when she has spent all of Wedderburn’s money, ends up in a brothel in Paris. There’s more of course, but that’s all third act stuff, and I don’t want to wander that close to spoilers.

As often seems to be the case for me with Lanthimos films, I’m completely nonplussed by it. The vast majority of the characters are emotionless, something that has frequently bothered me in his films in the past. What bothers me the most, though, is that I genuinely don’t like these characters. I don’t like any of them. They are all unpleasant and awful people. Spending more than two hours with them felt like eternity.

I suppose I’m going to have to live with the fact that Yorgos Lanthimos is going to continue to make dark universe Wes Anderson films, movies that have the same hyper-designed sets and hyper-stylized people but that dive into the deep end of human awfulness and end up making my stomach hurt. I didn’t hate this as much as I hated The Killing of a Sacred Deer, but that’s hardly a compliment.

Why to watch Poor Things: Most people seem to like it.
Why not to watch: It’s unpleasant at best.