Poor Things

What fascinates me most is the freedom with which the film is constructed. Yorgos Lanthimos turns a story of personal discovery into a gothic fairy tale, sex comedy, scientific fantasy and social satire at the same time, without allowing any of those layers to cancel out the others. Everything feels exaggerated, artificial and strange, and that is precisely why it ends up speaking about very recognizable things.
Emma Stone is extraordinary. Not only because she completely transforms her physicality, the way she walks, looks and speaks, but because she makes us see how a person learns to relate to the world almost from scratch. Her evolution never feels merely intellectual: it appears in the body, the language, the curiosity and the way she begins questioning everything others take for granted.
That almost scientific language made me laugh a lot. Bella observes, tests and draws conclusions as if life were one continuous experiment. Her insistence on verifying things "empirically" perfectly sums up a character who does not accept a rule simply because someone says it is correct. She wants to understand it for herself. And that makes many social conventions look rather ridiculous when viewed from the outside.
Mark Ruffalo also works very well because his character represents precisely the contradiction between boasting about freedom and actually tolerating it. Lanthimos gets plenty of comedy from the kind of man who considers himself modern as long as everything still revolves around his own desires. Once the woman beside him begins making decisions without asking permission, apparent sophistication can quickly turn into insecurity, possessiveness and tantrums.
The film is also visually dazzling. Impossible sets, exaggerated colours, wide-angle lenses, enormous costumes and cinematography that seems to move between Victorian illustration, dream and amusement park. It can be excessive, but that excess does not feel gratuitous to me: the world looks new because we are seeing it through someone for whom it genuinely is.
Beneath all that extravagance lies a fairly clear reflection on freedom. Not only sexual freedom, which is the most obvious element, but the freedom to learn, make mistakes, work, think, experiment and decide what kind of person you want to become. The film is most interesting when it avoids turning emancipation into a simple speech and presents it instead as a contradictory process.
Not everything feels equally successful. There are moments when Lanthimos seems so in love with his own visual universe and with provocation that the film could lose some material without losing strength. Its baroque style can become tiring and certain ideas are repeated more than necessary. But even in those excesses there is a creativity that is difficult to find in contemporary mainstream cinema.
In the end, Bella is what remains. Emma Stone creates an extraordinary character because she prevents her initial strangeness from becoming merely a joke. There is intelligence, humour, desire, innocence, selfishness, tenderness and almost limitless curiosity. Watching her learn the world eventually becomes a way of forcing us to look at it again.
Poor Things is excessive, funny, provocative, visually overwhelming and far more human than it initially appears. It may delight or irritate, but it hardly feels like a film designed by committee. It has a ferocious personality and, above all, an absolutely extraordinary Emma Stone.