VENICE, Italy—Last year, David Cronenberg released a disquieting, oddly dislocated film that imagined a time to come when surgery and organ replacement have reached an advanced stage, becoming a type of performance art, even a sexual kink. Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival yesterday, shares some of those themes. But where Crimes of the Future was (no pun intended) heartless, cold and dry, dulling its shocks in order to unsettle us further, Poor Things is plush and baroque, disturbing its audience with a giddy verve. This makes for an often disconcertingly pleasurable spectacle, the most crowd-pleasing of Lanthimos’ career.
Emma Stone plays Bella Baxter, whose body has been repurposed after her death by suicide. She had been pregnant at the time of her death, leading an eccentric scientist named Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) to replace her brain with that of her unborn baby, as an experiment. Bella therefore, when first we meet her, has the morphology of a woman but the faltering language, naivety and frankness of an infant. Stone’s gait expresses that disconnect: Though Bella’s muscles are at full maturity, her brain has only recently learned to move them, so she walks with a theatrical lurch, somewhere between a toddler’s waddle and the flounce of a marionette.
Indeed, Bella is a puppet of sorts, whose strings are pulled by Godwin—God, for short—and Poor Things depicts her just like a rag doll, in a series of delightfully frou-frou frocks with puffed sleeves a-go-go, in endless declensions of yellow.
