SGIFF Film Review: Poor Things

Editor-in-Chief Rhea Chalak reviews a film with a lot of buzz surrounding it, especially in the Western film circuit: Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest black comedy Poor Things (2023).

Yorgos Lanthimos has a reputation for making films with strange and bizarre characters and themes. Lanthimos’ past films are set in vastly different periods and settings — Dogtooth (2009) being of the modern domestic sphere, The Lobster (2015) in a strange dystopic interpretation of the future, The Favourite (2018) set in the opulence of the English royalty, and now Poor Things (2023) set in what looks like a warped interpretation of Victorian England — yet within these drastically different settings he lures out the perversity lurking beneath.

The film feels like a variant of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) in its presentation of an innocent and naive female protagonist who learns more about the role of the female individual in society after being thrown into a drastically different real world. However, where Barbie draws the line at clean, politically correct acid pink, Lanthimos in his signature style does not shy away from getting truly depraved, the film bordering on a morbid and erotic grotesque that feels more thrilling to watch.

The performances within the film are all powerful. Willem Dafoe plays a medical professor and scarred father figure with tenderness and random dialogues that seem like symptoms of deep unresolved trauma. Ramy Youssef plays a kind-hearted medical student who falls in love with Bella. Perhaps the best supporting performance of all is Mark Ruffalo, who plays a superficial and foppish cad who starts as charming but ends up a pathetic mess with perfect comedic timing. There are other fine performances from other actors such as Kathryn Hunter, Christopher Abbott and Margaret Qualley but their actual roles should remain ambiguous in this review and up for audience discovery upon watching the film. The film as a whole, however, appears to be a career best for Emma Stone, not just in terms of her acting but also production. She perfectly transitions from a hapless, bratty toddler to a more enlightened, assured, sexually liberated adult, made compelling especially through her physical acting. Production-wise the film ranks strongly in terms of acting, cinematography, costume and set design especially. A director is the soul of the film and the actors are the face; a producer is the quiet backbone that is mostly invisible but truly holds the film together. It appears that Stone’s hand in the film’s production has truly allowed for the film to achieve greater lengths and also provided a stage for Stone’s acting skillset to stretch to its filled capacity.

For all the visual beauty the film possesses, it feels hollow and dragged out. There are clear attempts made to touch on as many themes as possible, ranging even to socialism at some point. However, rather than add to the film it makes an audience struggle to retain attention and catch on to what the film is truly trying to present; instead, feeling vapid. There are attempts to present hypocrisies and flaws within society, but at the end of the day it is hard to ignore that Bella is a white woman of power and privilege; it feels almost condescending. And then, at a certain point, the film also presents sex work as empowering or a sign of autonomy for women, when in reality sex work is often more damaging than liberating to the feminist cause. Some of the other characters Bella interacts with are also people of colour — played by actors Ramy Youssef, Jerrod Carmichael, and Suzy Bemba — and often they seem to coddle or support her through her ignorance. This intersectionality at times feels overlooked, and as an audience member, I struggled to empathise with the overtly privileged Bella — there is something incredibly dystopian and tone-deaf to hear about an upper-class white woman discovering that problems exist in the world beyond herself. Is that intentional? Perhaps Lanthimos wanted to use this trope — a trope that is tired and worn out — to open his audience’s eyes to injustices present in society. For a society that is now much more nuanced and diverse, facing the aftermath of brutal colonial histories, this knowledge is nothing new. Rather, it comes across as alarmingly patronising and ironic. It seems Poor Things pulls out a lot of strings ambitiously but fails to neatly tie them up into a conclusion that feels truly satisfying, instead, leaving it abrupt and ineffective. 

Detaching from this flaws might be difficult, but upon trying, the viewing experience can be delectable, especially through the glamorous costume and set design. Almost predictably, the film starts in grainy black-and-white before transitioning to vibrant and lush colour as Bella begins to be more and more enlightened, but it is hard to complain about this predictability when the cinematography is such a visual treat. This, paired with the playful costume design which retains Victorian tendencies yet reimagines it to be vibrant and idiosyncratic makes the film unlike any other. For those who are especially fascinated with design, be it interiors/exteriors or fashion, Poor Things presents optic gift after gift in every scene presented. Look out especially for the chapter markers that are almost like entrancing and glorious moving postcards, the greatest extent the film touches with regards to the creativity within its design. 

The Frankenstein-like quality of the narrative is one that stuck to me through my viewing experience — perhaps also fuelled by its Victorian setting or the scarred visage of Dafoe’s character, or even the medical scenes present — I wrote in my Letterboxd review that it is “frankenstein if mary shelley was in a silly goofy mood”. It was later that I discovered that it is based on a book titled Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, who wrote it in a time far deviated from the Victorian era (1992) but purposefully incorporated Gothic and Romantic tendencies of the Victorian period, and very much echoed Shelley’s seminal text.

Poor Things is a film that is brimming with potential. However, it remains simply as that — the potential to be great but this greatness being out of reach. The lack of nuanced and thoughtful substance is truly disappointing. Especially set against the backdrop of today’s political scene, it feels all the more vital that films attempting to critique society do so in an insightful and complex way rather than doing so in a superficial, surface-level manner. Perhaps we were the real poor things after all.