Back in the days of Dogtooth , Lanthimos was a vital, vicious newcomer, placing the isolationist politics of his homeland, Greece, under a microscope. Even when he started working with movie stars for the absurdist rom-com The Lobster , he retained a certain snarling ferocity. The difference may be that where von Trier is a true misanthrope whose films end up acclaimed in spite of themselves, Lanthimos seems increasingly to desire awards and adulation, with Poor Things representing a new high or low for this tendency.
The narrative is one of metamorphosis, centered on the highly malleable Bella Baxter Emma Stone , introduced as the adopted-daughter-slash-patient of the mysterious Dr. Godwin Baxter Willem Dafoe. The latter is a grotesquely disfigured shut-in whose facial scars testify to his past as a subject in a series of sadistic scientific experiments administered by his father.
The result of this dubiously ethical gambit is a hybrid creation whose body is fully developed and whose mind is maturing at an exponential rateβthough not enough to keep Bella ahead of her own steep biological curve.
But instead of delving into truly murky waters of paternalism or pedophilia, Poor Things angles itself more triumphally as a story of sexual awakening, with Bella as a naive libertine rubbing her pleasure in the prudish faces of her countrymen. Godwin and becoming part of a sweetly dysfunctional family. Between her brilliantly uninhibited acting here and on The Curse βplaying a very different avatar of progressive valuesβStone is, as they say, on one; a generational talent approaching its peak.
Tasked with a physically demanding role where body language communicates at least as much as dialogue, she turns Poor Things into an acting decathlon and keeps coming up with gold. The title of Poor Things betrays the fundamental smugness of artists working from a vantage of cozy superiority who believe simple, lazy role reversalβthat is, men reduced to sweaty, pearl-clutching hystericsβis tantamount to genuine gender parody or parity.
