Poor Things

With eleven nominations at the Oscar, winning four awards among which were “Best Actress in a Leading Role,” “Best Makeup and Hairstyling,” “Best Costume Design” and “Best Production Design,” the rom-com dramatic film Poor Things is not a simple movie, but a visionary journey with a huge, massive psychological impact build in an extravagant and original way. While I was watching the movie, I was fascinated by the amazing work that the production did to bring Lanthimos vision to life in such a stylish way. 

At the beginning of the story, we can see Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) finding the dead body of a pregnant woman. He then decides to take the corpse to his lab to remove the baby inside the body where he replaces the woman’s brain with that of her baby. Next, he reanimates the body of the young lady so she is able to come back to life. He will call her Bella (Emma Stone), while she will call him “God.” Bella is like a true child and she will start to learn again how to walk and how to speak. Despite that Bella’s hunger for knowledge and experience become more and more strong, impossible to be contained within Godwin’s house. She takes the opportunity offered by a lawyer and a man called Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) to make new adventures around the world while their relationship will increase through the journey. 

It’s incredible how the colors change through the movie. We have a predominant black and white in Godwin’s home, but once Bella’s adventures forth the film shifts into colors transforming the movie into a wonderful Victorian painting. In this way it’s like we can see how important and crucial the experience for Bella’s development is to spread her wings. Emma Stone’s representation here is stunning: I think that this one is surely her career-best performance. She really creates skills to express the feelings of Bella through her journey. Also, she used men as a mirror which reflects the importance of woman’s decisions. Sex can be seen not only as a desire of men but also a wish of a young woman who wants to live freely her life.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos managed to create a movie which is like a wonderful, crazy weird cocktail of art and literature mixed in an alternative, fantastic world. We can find a little bit of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, of course the birth of Bella refers to Frankenstein of Mary Shelley. Furthermore, we can find Dali paintings especially for the set scenes in Lisbona city. I really appreciate the foresight and refinement in every single detail managed in a mastery care by the director, making the film like a sort of a patchwork of works of art. 

Poor Things is a disenchanted, gothic fairytale with a humoristic point of view that underlines and ridicules in some ways how men are selfish and addicted to sex through a feminine lens. While the female body is not an object, Bella in fact is free to decide her sexual life without responding to the prejudices of society. Of course, this movie is not only this as it’s also the explanation in a fantastic way of how necessary it is sometimes to be brave and live far from what we know to discover ourselves.