Poor Things review: Emma Stone’s raunchy gothic comedy is unlike anything you’ve seen in years

A young woman with an infant’s brain cuts a swathe through Europe in a madcap creation myth full of sex and substance. Photo / AP

FILM REVIEW

When word got out that a film version of Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things was in the works, lovers of the late Scottish author were as nervous as they were thrilled. Gray’s novels — playfully designed and intricately illustrated — always felt irreducibly bookish. Could the story survive the change in habitat?

Yorgos Lanthimos, director of Dogtooth and The Favourite, has shown it absolutely can. This triumphant adaptation strip-mines Gray’s book for all its funniest, fizziest and sexiest ideas, and leaves the chewier, more-literary stuff on paper where it belongs. I’d say purists might bridle, but speaking as one of them, I wasn’t only relieved, but overjoyed.

Poor Things is an exultantly raunchy and macabre gothic comedy in which an eccentric young Englishwoman, Emma Stone’s Bella, leaves the rambling home of her Scottish guardian Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) to cut a highly sexed swath through western Europe. She isn’t Godwin’s ward so much as his experiment: one night, a pregnant corpse was dredged from the Thames and, with lightning towers crackling in the grand old Frankenstein tradition, the disfigured medic implanted the unborn infant’s brain in its dead mother’s skull, creating a fully grown adult with a blank mental slate.

With jet-black hair and sharp eyebrows, Bella is as tempting as an Aubrey Beardsley etching, and Godwin’s flustered student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), who’s employed to keep tabs on her development, is duly enticed. But alas, Bella’s own affections turn to the caddish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), and this pair elope to Lisbon where her own journey of self-discovery begins.

Stone is courageously good in a role that requires her to spend many of her scenes not just nude, but engaged in what Bella fondly calls “furious jumping” with Ruffalo’s increasingly exhausted and wilting rake. (There are memes-in-waiting built into every other line of Tony McNamara’s uproarious script.) At first, Bella’s manner edges on avant-garde loopiness: when she explores Lisbon alone, she’s like a roving toddler, and the set is cleverly designed to conjure an adventure playground. But as her self-knowledge deepens, Stone’s performance does too. It’s wildly smart, deeply thought-through work, unlike anything you’ve seen in years.

Dafoe, meanwhile, delivers his lines in a fine Scottish burr, while Ruffalo channels Terry Thomas with hilariously wobbly results: his pantomime mangling of the accent somehow perfectly fits the mood. And though the film must contain more sex than the past 10 years of Hollywood’s output combined, there’s substance here too — at its core, this a parable of male possessiveness, and the various flawed escape routes that women can plot from it. Even Bella’s Edenic early life with Godwin, who she loadedly calls “God”, is, in the end, just another type of confinement.

Poor Things is a madcap creation myth with thrillingly humanist stakes. Being cast out of paradise isn’t a fall from grace here: it’s the first step on the long road towards it.

LOWDOWN

What: Poor Things

Who: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Margaret Qualley

Length: 141 minutes

Rating: Five stars

Poor Things is in New Zealand cinemas now.