And typically, humankind for Lanthimos exists inside a snow globe that he likes to shake for his own macabre amusement - literally, as DP Robbie Ryan frames the world quite often with a fish-eye lens, a device that occasionally tripped him up on “The Favourite” but here suits the material as seen from the wonder-struck point of view of Bella’s questing self. As any Lanthimos fan knows, those are touchstones of all his previous films, including the similarly themed “Dogtooth,” which also centered on people’s phenomenological encounters and coming-to-understanding of the world around them. While on a cruise ship across the Mediterranean, a cynical passenger played by Jerrod Carmichael (whose line readings are just a bit too deadpan) tells Bella that degradation, horror, and sadness are what make us people of substance. “I look at you and feel nothing but the lingering question of how did I ever want you?,” Bella tells Wedderburn, tired of his jealousies of her becoming her own person. “Poor Things” is filled with noxious, brash, tart-tongued zingers such as these, as is of course the trade of Tony McNamara, whose viperous lesbian erotic triangle in “The Favourite” spewed up endless quotable maxims sure to make their way into the dialogue pantheon. But as Bella grows keener and wiser with each day - and her raven-haired locks continue to grow at a preternatural speed - Wedderburn starts to wonder if she’s really just “the devil wrapped in an alluring body and a brain that picks people apart.” Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo in “Poor Things” Atsushi Nishijima Upon meeting the raffish, decadent lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (a petulant manchild Mark Ruffalo), Bella decides she must “adventure” rather than tie herself down to God and McCandles, to whom she’s engaged.Īnd such adventuring includes a lot of furious jumping indeed, as on a trip to Lisbon (an eye-popping, trippy creation by production designers Shona Heath and James Price), Duncan and Bella fuck in pretty much every position imaginable. Lanthimos and “The Favourite” screenwriter Tony McNamara, working from a 1992 epistolary novel by Alasdair Gray, are fascinated by the ways in which desire governs all our decision-making. “Poor Things” ultimately becomes about Bella’s erotic journey from out of the Freudian mirror stage and into the world as an awakened sexual being. Bella does something with an apple that would make Elio in “Call Me by Your Name” blush, and, still in a puerile, prurient state, calls sex “furious jumping,” suggesting to McCandles that perhaps they “touch each other’s genital pieces.” Now about that aforementioned raunchiness: Part of Bella’s existential learning curve of course comes with the discovery of masturbation, and then eventually sex, which “Poor Things” is filled with an outrageous amount of. “What a pretty little retard,” McCandles tells Godwin (whom Bella will come to simply call “God”) of his born-again creation as Bella sets about banging on surfaces, pissing herself, and babbling broken-English nonsense that slowly starts to take more recognizable linguistic shape. “Poor Things” Courtesy Yorgos Lanthimos/Searchlight Pictures, exclusive to IndieWire He is also a eunuch who has to “make my own gastric juices.” One of his operating-theater protégés is rookie village doctor Max McCandles (an adorably inept and perpetually gobsmacked Ramy Youssef), and together they’re bringing Bella Baxter back to life, with Max hoping to eventually marry her. He’s scarred - literally and psychically - by the torments of his surgeon father, and now with a face that looks like a Picasso painting, as if it’s been cut up, disassembled, rearranged haphazardly, and sewn back together. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe, grimly soothing). Contributing to these experimental medical anomalies is mortician and maddened scientist Dr. Lanthimos situates us in what looks like 19th-century Victorian London, but surrealistic subtleties that only increase in their strangeness suggest a cracked-open world out of place and time: horse-drawn carriages are literally half-horse, half-carriage, birds have shark faces, and a half-pig, half-chicken chimera walks the streets without anyone giving a passing thought. ![]() ![]() ‘A Haunting in Venice’ Review: A Supernatural Twist Can’t Energize Kenneth Branagh’s Lethargic Hercule Poirot
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