Film Review: Poor Things

TW: CSA, suicide

This review contains spoilers. It is also scathing. If Poor Things is one of your all-time favorites, if it touches some deep and important chord for you, if you cannot handle very, very harsh criticism of this movie, DO NOT CONTINUE PAST THIS POINT.

While convalescing from surgery, I decided to check out a film that has been highly recommended to me, for reasons that, in hindsight, remain fucking unknown and have caused me to look inward to question deeply what it is about me that would make someone think I would enjoy this movie. I hope to correct it.

I’m talking about Yorgos Lanthimos’s borderline-pedophilic horror show of female exploitation, Poor Things. The best I can say about this film is that if you’ve ever wondered what it would have been like if Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro made a movie about a masturbating Frankenstein, congratulations, you’ve got your answer.

I’ve read review after review praising the uniqueness of Poor Things’s design; it isn’t. Jeunet and Caro were employing the same atmospheric scores, haunting steampunk visuals, and dizzying camera work three decades ago. Emma Stone won the Academy Award for her tour-de-force performance; where was it? In the awkward walk and jerky movements? In the stiff, generic, pseudo-Shakespearean accent left over from The Favourite?

There’s a lot about Poor Things that I can unfavorably compare to The Favourite. The male-gaze focused obsession with the sexual lives of women. The pleasure both stories seem to take in showing us women with neurodiverse brains operating in exigent situations and passing off their exploitation as a charming amusement. The way the screenplays and direction make grotesqueries of those women, as if they’re being punished for daring to exist on the screen.

The character of Bella is a Frankenstein’s monster-style resurrection piece, with a disgusting twist. The film opens with a suicide, a woman plunging into a river. The woman, we later learn, is pregnant and taking her own life and the life of her unborn child to escape her violent and sadistic husband. A mad scientist, Godwin, played by Willam Defoe, gleefully recovers the still beautiful corpse for his experiments. In the ultimate denial of reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy, Bella’s mother isn’t allowed to choose to end her own life and rid herself of her pregnancy. Godwin steps in to violate her one last time, removing her brain and replacing it with that of her fetus’s.

Godwin himself has never known bodily autonomy, having been cruelly experimented on by his father. He raises Bella like a daughter as he observes her progress and shields her from the world and its dangers. Those dangers include the lecherous lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn, who lures Bella away from an arranged engagement and into a grand tour of steampunk Europe in search of all the pleasures she’s been denied. The sex! The food! The sex! The wine! The sex! More sex!

While the movie is allegedly about Bella’s journey through the world, learning, as she puts it, “parts of myself that are hitherto unknown,” the bulk of these hitherto unknown parts are located between her thighs. At the beginning of the movie, she isn’t toilet trained and speaks only in baby babble, but delights in playing with the flaccid penis of a corpse. She throws a violent tantrum at being denied ice cream, and kills a frog with no understanding of her actions, minutes before we see frequent scenes of her innocent masturbation, including inserting a cucumber into her vagina at the breakfast table.

Once she takes up with Mark Ruffalo’s villainous Wedderburn, there are endless, graphic scenes of intercourse, which Bella describes in her limited language. There is no sex, only “furious jumping.” There is no cunnilingus, just a “tongue trick.” When Bella does finally begin to use correct anatomical and sexual terms, it’s done for shock value, to emphasize that she doesn’t understand shame and unreservedly enjoys sexual pleasure. You know, just in case you were feeling weird about watching a child engage in sex acts.

The middle of the movie drags as Bella works in a brothel, for seemingly no other narrative reason than to show her in a variety of sexual situations, shot entirely in the male gaze. Man after man with bodies undesirable by Hollywood standards (too fat, too thin, too old, with a prosthetic hand) pump away interminable minutes without advancing the story, all so we can see Stone’s breasts bouncing in a variety of positions. In one particularly disgusting scene, Bella has sex with a man in front of his young sons in an educational lesson the viewer is apparently supposed to find charming and funny. The gag, you see, is that Bella is so childlike, she can’t possibly know that she’s engaging in child abuse.

If Bella is so childlike that she can’t understand that what she’s done is wrong, then she is too childlike for us to view her in explicit scenes of intercourse.

After spending the whole of the movie passed from man to man to man (and in a minutes-brief relationship with a woman, which also gets an explicit scene), Bella finally realizes her autonomy when her sexuality is endangered. Returned to the abusive husband that caused her mother to commit suicide, he threatens her with genital mutilation. She agrees with him that her sexuality is distracting her, but ultimately decides to shoot him and replace his brain with a goat’s. Free from the dominating male influences in her life, she sets out on the empowering path of… modeling herself after the man who violated her brain and the corpse of her pregnant mother. A man she has referred to as “God” throughout the film.

I cannot stress enough: this is a story about a literal infant’s brain inside the body of an adult woman. Bella isn’t childlike. It isn’t a case of an adult so sheltered that she has remained naive, but now she’s coming out of her shell. This isn’t about a disabled woman who has had her right to consent restricted and who is finally finding freedom. She isn’t childlike, she is a child. Yet, she sexually propositions men and women. She craves and enjoys sexual attention, and the audience is meant to accept that it’s simply the puritanical hang ups of polite society standing in the way of Bella attaining this thing she voraciously wants. It was impossible to watch this movie and not think of the millions of children failed by the courts when grown men have insisted that a child “came onto” them, or that they were tempted by allegedly sexually provocative acts. Bella’s inability to accurately describe these acts imitates the vague language used by abusers. The whole thing is like a propaganda film for the pedophiles who argue for the “sexual freedom” of children online.

There are a handful of moments in the movie that aren’t explicitly about Bella’s sexual journey. Upon her first encounter with violence, she throws up. Then, she returns to Wedderburn to sexually proposition him. When she learns about poverty, she hands over huge sums of money to two sailors, believing them when they promise to distribute it to the less fortunate. This causes her and Wedderburn to be kicked off the ship, leading to Bella’s employment in the brothel. Every non-sexual scene of philosophy about the world and its evils and delights is just a transition between explicit depictions and conversations about sex. It doesn’t really matter what Bella learns about the world when the majority of the film is dedicated to insisting that a child would absolutely be sexually promiscuous in a free-thinking society.

If you’d like to watch a Frankenstein fuck, I suggest renting Frankenhooker. It doesn’t try to hide what it’s truly about, and everyone involved is over the age of consent, in body parts and brains.