Critic
Emma Stone Gives the Performance of Her Career in Poor Things
The jaw-dropping film from director Yorgos Lanthimos leaps from audacity to audacity.
Emma Stone in Poor Things.
Source: Searchlight Pictures.
Poor Things begins with a death and a birth. A distraught woman hurls herself off London Bridge. A short time later, Bella—that’s the name Godwin Baxter, a Victorian Dr. Frankenstein, gives her—is alive again. But she’s definitely not herself. Discovering that the woman he dragged out of the river was pregnant, Baxter transplants the still-living brain of the fetus into the dead woman’s skull.
It’s certainly a provocative comic premise. Is Poor Things an elaborate comment on abortion? A dead woman being reanimated for the sake of her fetus isn’t really “pro” anything.