"Poor Things" Is a Wacky, Wonderful Work of Genius with a Fearless Performance by Emma Stone - Venice Film Festival 2023

Emma Stone & Kathryn Hunter in Poor Things

(Venice, Italy) How to describe Poor Things? An R-rated Frankengirl coming-of-age "Lucy in the Skies with Diamonds" happy acid trip? Barbie on steroids? You can't squish it into a genre because it is utterly original, hysterically funny, and loaded with imagination.

Each year, Venice is one of the filters that films pass through on their way to the Oscars. Poor Things is sure to rack up a bunch of nominations, for everything from acting and directing, to production and costume design, soundtrack, and cinematography -- just everything.

"Creativity is intelligence having fun."

                        --attributed to Albert Einstein

                                        

Emma Stone is Bella Baxter. When we first meet her, we see a grown woman behaving like a wobbly two-year-old, joyfully smashing plates and peeing on the floor. She is confined in a Victorian house outside of London with Godwin Baxter, a brilliant scientist and surgeon with a face like Frankenstein's monster, played by Willem DaFoe. 

Bella calls Godwin “God” for short. Her vocabulary is delightful and fantastical, a combination of innocent childlike babbling mixed with worldly and scientific terms she's picked up from conversations with God.

Also wandering around the house are an assortment of Dr. Baxter's experimental hybrid pets, like a chicken with a pig's head and a goose with the head of a dog. Mrs. Prim (Vicki Pepperdine) is the housekeeper who cleans up the messes and assists Dr. Baxter with his experiments.

Dr. Baxter hires his star student, mild-mannered Max McCandles (Rami Yousef), to observe Bella and chart her progress without revealing her origin story (is she mentally impaired? ill? crazy?) When McCandles starts asking questions, Dr. Baxter agrees to tell him the "happy" story. We learn that Bella is his most daring experiment. She was an unidentified woman who attempted suicide by jumping off a bridge. Dr. Baxter reanimated her by implanting an infant's brain into her adult body, and naming her Bella. 

Like a toddler, Bella throws tantrums as she learns how to speak and marvels at how her body moves. Her hair grows at an astonishing rate. The longer her hair grows, the more developed her mind and body become. One day, sitting alone at the dining room table, she has a spectacular orgasm with an apple, gasping, "Bella discover happy when she want!"

Bella loves sex and wants more of it. She also wants to get out of the house and travel to places she has only seen on maps. Dr. Baxter schemes to keep her trapped at home by marrying her to the temperate McCandles, who has fallen in love with her.

Enter Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a sleazy lawyer who thinks he's God's gift to women, hired to write the marriage contract. When Wedderburn reads the restrictive language, he searches the house for the woman being entrapped. When he finds Bella, he tells her that he will show her the world, and she eagerly agrees.

Off they trot to have wild and erotic adventures in kaleidoscope versions of Lisbon, Alexandria, and Paris as Bella evolves into a self-created woman who lives on her own terms.

Poor Things is so marvelous that it renews my hope in both humanity and Hollywood. It is a movie that you must see in the theater. I hope it wins the Golden Lion so I can see it again.

Read some of the reviews to whet your appetite as you wait for the film to be released by Searchlight Pictures on December 8, 2023 in the US and January 12, 2024 in the UK:

Emma Stone in Poor Things

Euro News

Yorgos Lanthimos' new film is already one of 2023's very best

Poor Things is so damn good, it’s hard to know where to start the praise... Every set, prop, costume, and cuter versions of The Island of Dr. Moreau’s hybrid creatures are something to behold in this brilliantly nuts voyage of self-discovery.... Thematically layered, raunchy, marvellously executed and above all fun, Poor Things is a triumph.

The Guardian
Emma Stone has a sexual adventure in Yorgos Lanthimos’s virtuoso comic epic

Stone gives a hilarious, beyond-next-level performance as Bella Baxter, the experimental subject of a troubled Victorian anatomist, in Lanthimos’s toweringly bizarre comedy

Time
Emma Stone Works Twisted Fairytale Magic in Poor Things

And Poor Things, adapted from Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, is something else again: opulent and optimistic, Poor Things suggests, in its own perverse way, that most human beings have the capacity to change for the better, and that a world of kindness would be achievable if every individual pitched in to the best of their ability.

Variety

Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos Fly Their Freak Flags in a Delicious Coming-of-Age Story Like No Other

Brilliantly taking on Alasdair Gray's comic novel with 'The Favourite' writer Tony McNamara, Lanthimos serves up a macabre sensory banquet miles from his former Greek weird-wave asceticism, but just as subversive.

Entertainment Weekly

Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo lead a demented comedy of self-creation and degradation

Poor Things is unquestionably the performance of Stone's career, her wide eyes employed to perfection in Bella's own wonder at the world. Holly Waddington's costumes — a Vivienne Westwood-esque blending of Victorian, punk, and mod styling — aid in her transformation. Stone is a gifted comedic actress and she is an ideal match for Lanthimos' tone, a strange mix of black comedy, farce, and social commentary.

Ciao from the Venice Film Festival,
Cat Bauer

Venetian Cat - The Venice Blog