Is Poor Things the Best We Can Do for Female Sexuality Onscreen?

movie review

Updated
2:00 P.M.

Is Poor Things the Best We Can Do for Female Sexuality Onscreen?

By
Angelica Jade Bastién,
a New York and Vulture critic covering film and pop culture

Emma Stone fully commits to a banal rendition of faux-feminist sexual freedom.
Photo: Yorgos Lanthimos/Searchlight Pictures

This review was originally published on December 15, 2023. Since then, Poor Things has been nominated for 11 Oscars, including Best Picture, and is now available to stream on Hulu.

What Poor Things aims to be is a fantasia of sherbet colors and steampunk steel, a Frankenstein-inflected philosophical questioning and a wild girl’s coming of age, a pitch-black farce and a sexual investigation that hinges upon the belief that, yes, women captain their destinies. And I can sense that everyone involved in the film — from screenwriter Tony McNamara, who adapted the novel by Alasdair Grey, to director Yorgos Lanthimos and leading lady Emma Stone, to even composer Jerskin Fendrix — is committed to these ragged, wide-ranging impulses. But those impulses are rancid. For a film whose camera is so obsessed with its lead actress’s body, it is remarkably sterile on the subject.

Taking place in the late Victorian era, Poor Things centers on Bella Baxter (Stone), an orphaned young woman under the careful eye of a viciously scarred scientist-surgeon named Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), whom she calls “God.” She’s introduced as a woman with mental disabilities — slamming porcelain plates onto the floor with grinning gusto and pissing on herself — to the scientist-student underling Godwin has hired to contain her, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef). But Bella seeks adventure and knowledge about the world as passionately as Godwin bars her from experiencing it. He eventually arranges for her to marry Max as an ultimate form of imprisonment masked as kindness, which leads her on a peripatetic journey with a lascivious lawyer named Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), during which she takes on and casts off lovers, gorges on oysters and pastries, ponders, and fucks some more.

Poor Things, with its nearly two-and-a-half-hour run time, sags toward the end and could usefully shave at least twenty minutes. Yet the film never outright feels sluggish as it is poised to punch and bruise rather than allure. But there’s a corroded spirit to the story, like it’s intermittently possessed by an edgelord who’s unaware most women menstruate, and an early-wave white feminist who believes having sex is the most empowering thing a woman can do. (For all the fucking, there is no menstrual blood!) In many ways, the film demonstrates the limits of the modern cis-male auteur’s vision for and about women — particularly their sexual selves. Watching it for any sort of feminist revelation is akin to craving the salty chill of the ocean and the spray of a wave upon your face, and having to settle for resting your ear against a curling seashell, listening to only the echo of what you truly desire.

About 20 minutes into Poor Things, the audience and Max learn the truth of Bella’s captivity under Godwin. She has been reanimated after having thrown herself off the edge of a bridge. Godwin found her still warm body, decked in a magnificent gown the color of a vibrant sea and improbably intact, including the still living baby she was carrying. “I could have kept her alive,” Godwin notes. “It was obvious. Take the infant brain out and put it in the full grown woman.” Godwin frames his decision as respecting Bella’s former self’s wish for suicide even though it’s anything but.

So this woman we’ve been presented with isn’t a woman at all but a baby girl in the grown woman’s body that was once her mother. The very next scene is Bella discovering masturbation and orgasms. Still in the crisp black-and-white color scheme that marks the beginning passages of the film, Bella is alone in her bedroom, legs splayed, discovery rendered in those roving eyes. Then, at the dinner table, she experiments with an apple. The camera tracks closer to her face as it grows flush with pleasure until her mouth fills the screen as she heaves and moans. Next, she tries a cucumber. These early scenes of sexual discovery come across as cinematic exhibitionism: They’re less about limning the interiority of Bella and more about a juvenile instinct to shock. Soon enough, she’s having sex with Duncan Wedderburn, riding him with intensity after they’ve made their way to Lisbon.

As Duncan, Mark Ruffalo is woefully arch. He’s a cunning lawyer who’s intrigued by the contract Godwin had him drum up to effectively imprison Bella in a marriage to Max. And so Duncan seeks to capture her for himself. Bella knows he’s a cad, but he brings her pleasure and opportunity outside the realm of Godwin’s grasp. Like so much of the film itself, Ruffalo is too interested in surface-level provocation, delighting in every overly pronounced line of dialogue to the point of becoming cloying. The more instructive performances are given by Dafoe and Stone. In any other movie, Dafoe’s Godwin would be presented as grim and monstrous; here, he is kindly and paternal even as he refers to Bella as an experiment and flouts her autonomy. Godwin himself was subjected to experimentation by his father that left him a scarred husk of a man unable to process food without the help of hulking machinery; this approach makes a significant effort to nullify the horrors of what Godwin has done. Dafoe plays every movement and gesture as labored. He shuffles and sighs and sulks. His Godwin is less the manipulative and cruel Dr. Frankenstein figure and more an odd and ultimately caring patriarch dubiously driven by progress.

Stone is undoubtedly committed too. As Bella matures, her movements shift from boldly angular to silkenly controlled. But it’s all superficial machinations; we’re told that she is gluttonously curious about the novel world she’s traipsing through, yet most of her obsessions tilt inward. In theory, charting the way a woman becomes her own muse can be a splendid undertaking. But Poor Things makes the fatal mistake of thinking the only thing interesting to a liberated woman is herself. Her naïvety is played for laughs, and not introspection, so that when her baby brain evolves, it’s unclear what particular intellectual and pleasure-seeking pursuits guide her beyond what Godwin and the other lurking men have encouraged. Stone gives a typically ostentatious performance — all tics, cartoonish gestures, searchlight eyes — without piquant moments of silence or reflection. Of course, this is how Tony McNamara wrote Bella: a charming and chaotic spectacle.

That Bella’s quest for self-discovery is obtained primarily through interactions (sexual and otherwise) with men is a tell. She delights in becoming a sex worker in Paris, though she only shallowly interacts with another woman employed there. Neither script nor direction illuminates the shape of the patriarchal forces that brought these women here, and given the detail put into the visual components of the world, the lack of material context is glaring. It’s as overly dewy a worldview as Bella’s insistent belief that, as Godwin told her, her C-section scar is the result of an “accident.” An obvious question lingers over it all: Is Bella carving her own path or is she fulfilling the experiment Godwin initiated? It’s the cinematic equivalent of watching a brightly colored top spin and spin, wondering when it’ll topple under its own weight.

And look, I love a good sex scene. In an interview with the New York Times, Lanthimos discussed the concept of sex scenes in movies, saying, “I just never understood the prudishness around it. It always drives me mad how liberal people are about violence and how they allow minors to experience it in any way, and then we’re so prudish about sexuality.” But sex scenes aren’t worthwhile merely for existing. They should be sweaty and yearning and intrigued by the flesh as much as the personalities within, lest they tip into the very misogyny Poor Things thinks it’s critiquing. Lanthimos’s lens is not interested in the sex lives of women as much as the ways in which a young woman’s body can be positioned and used. Which isn’t to say sex scenes need to move a plot along or provide narrative purpose for a story. But in a film like Poor Things, where interiority is subsumed by exhibition and sexual expression, they simply carry more burdens. Left unattended, scenes like the Paris brothel sequence play like a male fantasy, and Bella’s “furious jumping” becomes aseptic rather than transgressive. These are sex scenes primed on the pleasure of others — the camera’s craven gaze, the men she rides, the people who think this is at all outré. The primary failure of Poor Things’ sex scenes is rooted in the decision to make Stone’s character mentally a child, blasted clean of history. I want to see what a grown woman thinks and feels about sex! Show a woman with a body and brain above the age of 40 getting gloriously railed. Lanthimos did capture the prickly complications of fucking and fighting at a certain age in The Favourite. But with Poor Things, he’s regressed. This isn’t a sincere treatise on female sexuality, it’s a dark comedy for people who carry around an NPR tote bag.

Poor Things is ultimately ugly — spiritually and narratively, which curdles even its aesthetic splendor. Though there are faults to be found on this ground too; namely, the discordant, jaunty score grates. Visually, Poor Things begins in overlit black and white and ends in ecstatic displays of color, reflective of how Bella’s world opens up and gains vibrancy. But cinematographer Robbie Ryna’s use of a fish-eye lens and extreme close-ups is garish enough to make me wince. The greatest triumph of the film is the costuming. Holly Waddington’s eye for color and texture is tremendous, particularly when it comes to Bella’s wardrobe. Fabric bunched, pleated, boned, refined; colors of ripe plums, cotton candy, burnished gold, limes cut in two. Stone wears it all with as much panache as Waddington put into her crafting. But beyond the wardrobe is mostly hollow bombast that comes across as a late-era Tim Burton excess or Terry Gilliam without the wonder. And this hollowness bleeds into the supporting acting. Jerrod Carmichael gives one of the most uncomfortable and unnatural performances I’ve seen in a long time. Margaret Qualley as a mostly wordless experiment Godwin conjures because he misses Bella barely registers. Ramy Youssef shoots for tenderness, but the nature of the premise makes such a posture unbelievable.

Around this time last year, I wrote that all great directors are perverts. But in watching Poor Things, I remembered that perversion must be freighted with a genuine curiosity about the humanity of the people involved. Instead, Poor Things comes across as a pretentious 14-year-old boy’s idea of female becoming, if that boy had a Criterion Channel subscription. It’s bargain-basement humor with explicit sex that dares the audience to get turned on by the born-yesterday trope given flesh. Bella is a closed circuit. All her supposed feminism and curiosity toppling in on itself. Poor Things premiered almost four months after Barbie and has been unfairly compared to Greta Gerwig’s tale of awakening as a result. That magenta wonderland of a film may have some faults, but it takes a sincere interest in the interior conflicts of its many female characters. Poor Things can’t summon interest in one. 

Is Poor Things Really the Best We Can Do?