Poor Things

Emma Stone and her enormous, bulging eyes play Bella Baxter, the guileless product of a deranged scientific experiment that intertwines the wreckage of a suicidal adult with an infant brain completely untouched by any previous experience. Naturally, the same childlike affect that sees Bella relentlessly hoovering up any and all information also attracts slathering, Victorian bachelors in their droves; each man petitioning to ensnare this innocent but unusually liberated woman. Bella sees and interprets all: a concept reflected in Robbie Ryan's cinematography, whose perspectives range from monochromatic and partially obscured to technicolour and glaring when Bella is at the height of her powers. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and written for the screen by Tony McNamara (based on the book of the same name by Scottish author Alasdair Gray), Poor Things very obviously riffs on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, with Willem Dafoe's scarred vivisectionist standing in for the Swiss body snatcher. Instead of a sagging but sapient failure scorned by all though, Bella is raven-haired and luminous; courted again and again by a succession of weeping cads who all long to nail her down to their own living quarters. In this sense there's more than a little of Charles Dickens' Estella, the emotionally cool heartbreaker from Great Expectations, to Bella. Like Miss Havisham's icy ward, Bella expresses an avowedly independent form of femininity. Similarly, the emotional terror of being human is decoded with an exacting logic that does not waste a great deal of time consoling with the heartbroken men she leaves in her wake. Mark Ruffalo's Duncan Wedderburn soaks up the lion's share of the damage, slowly transforming from a Terry-Thomas-style scoundrel into a figure of shrieking farce. His boastful cocksmanship coming up short when faced with the insatiable appetite of a person locked into a relentless, data-gathering phase.