Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things turns a gothic premise into a bright, perverse coming-of-age odyssey. Bella Baxter, played with fearless elasticity by Emma Stone, lives in a Victorian world with retro-futurist kinks and storybook colors. She begins with an infant’s mind in an adult body and barrels through cities, lovers, and moral systems like a newborn cyclone. The film’s hook is sensational, but what lingers is how Bella makes rebirth feel literal, political, and oddly hopeful.
A Bizarre Origin That Makes Emotional Sense
Bella’s maker, the scarred surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), revives a dead woman by implanting a fetus’s brain into her skull. That choice sounds like pure shock, yet the movie plays it as a twisted chance at a clean slate. Bella learns words the way a toddler does.
She eats, laughs, stumbles, and shouts her curiosity at the ceiling. The setup is unmistakably macabre, but the performance steers it toward empathy. We are invited to watch a person assemble herself from zero, not just wake up and remember who she used to be.
Desire as a First Language
From the moment Bella recognizes pleasure, she treats sex like a school. Her flight from Baxter’s protected house with the swaggering lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) is not a fall from grace. It is coursework. She tests boundaries, names what she wants, and refuses shame.
The movie does not punish her curiosity. It lets her mistakes count as data. That is the radical part. In most tales with a “mad science” birth, the woman is a cautionary object. Here, she is the experimenter, and everyone else struggles to keep up.
The World as a Laboratory
Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan shoot Bella’s education as a series of wildly textured field trips. Lisbon gleams like a surreal postcard. Alexandria tilts into feverish heat and harsh inequity. Paris curdles into a brothel where Bella studies labor, power, and the economics of desire.
Each stop recalibrates her sense of ethics and appetite, and each city looks engineered for sensation, with curving lenses, theatrical skies, and sets that feel hand-built rather than digitally polished. The result is a universe that mirrors Bella’s brain: elastic, hungry, and a little ridiculous.
Craft That Makes The Grotesque Inviting
So much of the film’s argument lives in its design. Production designers Shona Heath and James Price create a Victorian-ish sandbox where chandeliers bloom like sea creatures and streets look painted by a mischievous anatomist.
Robbie Ryan’s camera leans into fisheye distortion and vintage textures that make faces and rooms bulge with possibility. Jerskin Fendrix’s score saws and hums like a body learning to breathe. Together, the craftspeople turn a tale of surgical trespass into an extravagant fable about sensation. You feel Bella’s world stretching to accommodate her.
Godwin, Max, Duncan: Three Mirrors That Crack
The men around Bella help define her by failing to contain her. Godwin loves her as both guardian and author, a confusing bond that cannot last once she wants authorship of herself. Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), the medical student who adores her, offers marriage as a sanctuary, a sweet idea that collapses when Bella decides safety is not growth.
Duncan arrives as a tour guide to vice and quickly becomes a case study in masculine panic, especially when Bella’s desire expands beyond his control. Each man tries to name her. She keeps rewriting the label.
Rebirth Without Nostalgia
Stories about women built or rebuilt often circle back to the men who made them. Poor Things is not interested in circling. Bella’s curiosity pulls her forward through bad choices and brilliant ones, and the narrative keeps pace with that forward tilt.
Emma Stone’s Fearless Tightrope
This performance needed extremes. Stone lets Bella be shameless, silly, arrogant, and painfully earnest, often within a minute. She changes her gait as her mind develops. She modulates diction from toddler thumps to cool precision.
Crucially, she never treats Bella’s sexuality as a stunt. It is biology, curiosity, and agency braided into a single forward motion. The role has been showered with trophies for good reason, but the awards only confirm what the film itself makes obvious: you are watching a complete creation, not an actor doing clever tricks.
Triumph Written In Eyeliner and Brass
Industry chatter turned into hardware when the film racked up prizes for performance and craft. You can see why voters responded. The makeup and hairstyling make Godwin’s face a map of bad miracles.
The costumes chart Bella’s cognitive bloom, moving from cocoon to weaponized glamour. Production design becomes a character, nudging the story toward the unreal and then daring you to feel it anyway. This is maximalism with purpose, and it leaves a mark.
In the end, Bella Baxter’s rebirth is not about innocence recovered. It is about authorship seized. Poor Things lets a woman learn out loud, in public, without tidying her mess for anyone’s comfort. The film is lush, rude, and weirdly tender, and its monster turns out to be a new kind of heroine. That is a resurrection worth believing in.
Rachel Sikkema is a New Zealand-based writer and creative entrepreneur who explores the intersection of film, culture, and modern relationships. Through her articles, she examines how stories shape the way we connect, love and see ourselves. When she’s not writing about film and television, she’s watching Dexter and The White Lotus for the third time.