“It’s a film not suited to summaries, because just to call it a Frankenstein retelling or a coming-of-age isn’t enough”
It’s probably quite inadvisable to approach a piece of art through the perspective of its medium first – to see it as a film specifically and only then as a story in general – which is, of course, precisely why I intend to do that; but also because being a film is the defining quality of Georgios ‘Yorgos’ Lanthimos’s Poor Things – and I mean that literally, Poor Things is a film, a hundred metres long spool of light-sensitive material which through alchemical manipulation is turned into a series of images which we recognise as a movie. And yes, yes, you can certainly just catch a digital screening, marvel at the VFX (and there is a lot to marvel at), even just the colour grading, but underneath it is all just a series of bodies, spaces, colours and lights captured through what is essentially magic (with some help from silver halide crystals). That awareness, of seeing a physical thing and not merely a disembodied image, is Poor Things’ greatest success and not just in terms of the medium on which it is captured, which works as only the entry point into a constant awareness of the tangible, visceral material that forms it and is, for me, the film’s central concern, far more so than its narrative or characters.
Below the physicality of the film stock this is, of course, most strongly felt in the visual triumph that is essentially all of Poor Things’ production design – the raging, colourful skies that bring to mind the painted backgrounds of early science fiction; the impossibly rising forms of the sets, mixing art nouveau, steampunk and German expressionist cinema; the incredible costume design – all of it just familiar enough, just recognisable enough as following from real artistic movements, as if a memory of how history feels – some long forgotten part of our visual lexicon, it is speaking a known language but in a new, surprising form that has you wandering like a child in its setting. And the texture of it all! – the stucco of Lisbon’s walls, the rusted deck and polished wood of the cruise ship, the padded walls of Dr Baxter’s residence. The film opens with them, the title sequence panning over fabric decorations of the mansion – delicately embroidered scenes on padded material, filmed so close that you can see its individual threads, and are reminded that all the objects and happenings on screen are real (even if reality is here sometimes birthed digitally). And that alone makes this a worthwhile project – placing the audience in its setting and having them constantly aware of the materiality of what’s on display. Sure, some digital effects were used, backgrounds filled in, water simulated and lights made more dramatic, but the visual splendour on display is almost too great to believe that; it’s actually easier to see the miniatures, the facades, the sets and props, and through that be brought into a style of cinema that seems aware of its own existence but without any boring meta nods to the audience – instead using the presence of the camera in the consistent visual distortions and the grain of the film, as well as the theatricality of the performances and their presence in the narrative. And when all of those come in contact – not only actor with actor but actor with the camera, the actor with the audience – our focus is brought towards the bodily, the visceral, the sexual, the physical.
“To once again have a conversation about depicting sex on screen, or talking about how strange its style is and how disgusting the body horror can never lead us to the core of a work: there is the question of “what do these things do” leads, and in the case of Poor Things that question is difficult to answer.”
It is still a character drama and this is perhaps where it fails, or falters at least. None of those failings are technical – that would be difficult with the quality of both the script and the performances, especially Emma Stone’s achievement (though there is certainly a conversation to be had about the film seemingly conflating her childlike and neurodivergent-coded traits) in showing a fully formed, commanding presence while having her character experience everything anew with confusion and joyous excitement, as well as Willem Dafoe’s surprising tenderness that exists on a different grounding than even the more emotional and intimate moments of the film. And that ability of the actors is crucial in placing them too in a state of constant awareness of their bodies, often expressed in quite refreshing ways (in terms of framing, and distorting cinematography), building an at times uncomfortable awareness of what it means to touch, to experience, to embrace and live. It would then be simplistic to call any aspect of the film simply “disgusting”, not just because the awareness it invokes is far more insidious, but also because “disgust” seems to be an obvious response to it, talking about something that isn’t really material to the film’s own concerns as a way of brushing away any purposes it might actually have. I don’t expect the film to guide the audience away from that, but judging from the reactions in the theatre, most of it ends up caught up in the disgust and becomes paradoxically quite comfortable in Lanthimos’s constant balancing of comedy, body horror and sexually explicit content, by being able to explain it away as just the fancy of a “weird” filmmaker and thus become unable to engage with the fact that through the embodying, textured design, the movie blurs the line between its constituent genres and between the bounds of what’s pleasurable and what’s terrifying.
And in the transitional space between those, Poor Things presents a psychosexual landscape that I might find largely foreign, but the questions of ownership, of creation and of experience contained within it (arising especially through Lanthimos’s signature absurdist writing) are still stated and expressed in terms that are always interesting. It’s a film not suited to summaries, because just to call it a Frankenstein retelling or a coming-of-age isn’t enough, even “a total and overpowering exploration of sensation” would be an overstatement. It isn’t enough either to merely point out how all of these goals are twisted throughout the film – Bella has a woman’s body through the course of her coming of age, and the sensations are at times overpowering for the audience as well (especially with the extended, wailing notes of the excellent score) because all of those well-known gestures are effective through a more fundamental novelty. The question of how the film is even experienced – its wide lenses, momentum, silent and surreal title cards, comedic cuts and most importantly interactions between characters, typically tender and revolting at the same time – all of this produces an extraordinary series of sequences, of scenes attacking and elevating the audience, connected up into a raging, transfixing flow.
But as Poor Things carries us through singularly excellent scenes and their built-up tension, it becomes easy to miss the direction in which it takes us. It is concerned with its plot, its fiction but none of this adds to the totality of the work, the film seems to be in the end concerned only with itself, its interior world and not the wider ideas with which it recons nor their effect on the audience. This is especially seen in the conclusion which tries to extend and twist conflicts that should have been long solved. Otherwise, the entirety of the story would splatter onto the ground without a conclusion, so it takes the alternative, but not necessarily better, path of funnelling all of itself towards a singular aim. That all of it, even the majority of the subplots, is subordinated to Bella’s personal journey is a simple example of Poor Things’ disappointing conclusiveness – and it may be unfair to criticise the film for breaking a promise it never makes, but I feel like we end up with a less interesting work in that way and to be uninteresting is, in this case, worse than being bad. Where it succeeds most is in the ambiguity, in how readily it invites the audience to try to understand and experience all its visual and textual richness – and to have all that subjugated to a single perspective feels like a missed opportunity in a film that seems to offer so much for personal exploration and then halfway through grasps the audience’s hand and guides to a predetermined conclusion, choosing, I think, the least interesting of possible routes. Now, that warrants a few immediate amendments (can’t you let a man have his clickbait?). I find the idea of calling a film “weird”, “disturbing”, “controversial”, “disgusting”, “strange” to be both personally quite inapplicable and more widely useless in conversations, which eliminates for me a significant part of Poor Things’ critical appeal. To once again have a conversation about depicting sex on screen, or talking about how strange its style is and how disgusting the body horror can never lead us to the core of a work: there is the question of “what do these things do” leads, and in the case of Poor Things that question is difficult to answer.
Underneath what some will call the film’s “strangeness”, very little ambiguity can actually be found, and for a director like Lanthimos that’s the strange thing. Look at The Lobster, The Favourite – both movies that tackle similar themes of love, sexuality, societal expectation, and power, with their understated dialogue, their single-minded focus, the forcing of characters to experience the world wholly anew and “birth” them into its absurd rules while giving them no guiding hand. Poor Things finds a replacement for many of those elements, often in ways I find genuinely more exciting (I could have spent all of this review on just the architectural detail of the sets and their transformation of known locations into surreal figurative spaces), and they should provide the same breadth and uncertainty in the audience member, perhaps even more so, since I’ve mentioned the viewer being pulled so deeply into the picture’s materiality – not only the characters, but the audience itself could be slowly, uncomfortably made aware of the absurdity of their circumstance and the horrifying bounds of their bodies and in the same way be denied conclusions or escape, trapped in the theatre, in the predetermined conclusions of the script. But not all these goals find an analogue or a replacement in Poor Things; think of the endings to The Lobster, that empty space of waiting that the audience member is asked to fill in with their own belief, to the ending of The Favourite where the reality around the characters collapses into a singular repeated gesture, a cycle of self-disgust, and now to Poor Things, to how cleanly it resolves itself, to how by the end it suddenly becomes far more concerned with its plot than its metaphor, how it leaves its questions somewhere behind it. It is triumphant in a way – you could say that Bella Baxter is the first of Lanthimos’s characters who succeeds at resolving their struggle, she certainly deserves that, but the world around her seems to contort in that direction. The same world that just before imposed such a challenge and difficulty in self-definition now works only for Bella’s self-realisation. Here’s the true absurdity: to see the end of a “strange” and “absurd” movie that doesn’t leave you conflicted if you don’t easily get caught up in its more “shocking” elements, and if you enter its wonderfully realised setting deeply enough to be guided through it without much of an ability to explore it on your own. If a director makes continuously a single movie, asking a single question, Lanthimos’s would certainly be one about love, feeling, the efficacy of experience and about absurdity of the world’s rules, power structures, expectations and a drive to live despite them – and I am not certain what Poor Things – despite all its successes, wonders and revelations – adds to the answer.
WORDS: Tomasz Balcerkiewicz
