Emma Stone shines in ‘Poor Things’
washingtonblade.comIf you’re not familiar with the work of filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, you might not be fully prepared for the level of oddness you’ll encounter in “Poor Things,” the Greek director’s latest work and winner of the Golden Lion Award at the 2023 Venice Film Festival.
Known for the unsettling and vaguely grotesque absurdities of his mise en scène in movies like “The Lobster” or “The Favourite” the material he’s chosen this time allows his droll-but-disturbing imagination to run wild.
Adapted by Tony McNamara from Scots writer Alasdair Gray’s 1992 faux-Victorian sci-fi novel of the same name, it’s the strange and Odyssean tale of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a young woman whose past is shrouded in mystery after her experimental reanimation by a brilliant-but-controversial doctor (Willem Dafoe, sporting elaborately disfiguring facial prosthetics) following an attempted suicide.
With whatever old life she may have had erased from her memory and no exposure to the outside world, she sets out to gain knowledge and experience before settling down into an arranged marriage with a young research assistant (Ramy Youssef), embarking with a debauched lawyer (Mark Ruffalo) for an extended sea cruise, an adventure that shapes her rapidly developing sense of self even as setbacks along the way – along with the shadow of her forgotten former life – threaten to derail her journey to autonomy and force her forever back into the gilded cage of isolation with which women of her era were expected to content themselves.