Poor Things And Hollywood’s Strange Fling
Yorgos Lanthimos' 2023 film is among his strangest yet
There’s a breed of movie that seems focused on confusing viewers as the main mission and it’s one that’s taken hold in recent years. But there’s a growing breed of reviewers that seems not to mind. In a year that saw the release of Inside, Cocaine Bear, Dream Scenario, Beau Is Afraid, and Saltburn, closing out the calendar with the quintessentially odd Poor Things perhaps was only par for the course.
Of course, I’m no stranger to the strange. Being John Malkovich, Magnolia, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are each films that hold enduring spots on my list of all-time greats. I’m not opposed to the hair-raisingly unusual. Poor Things is a captivating, well-constructed, and meticulously engineered oddity. But it’s an oddity no less. Its aim seems to be keeping the viewer’s eyebrow dented in confusion more than it is to entertain. And in its lofty goal, it succeeds on all fronts.
Known largely for The Lobster and The Killing of the Sacred Dear, few were able to walk into Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest project without some expectation of the bizarrity that was going to unfold. It’s not exactly a movie that aims to be the typical family blockbuster.
There’s an enormous amount to be said for this proliferating race of cinematic odyssey. Poor Things is evocative, spectacularly well-acted, shot, crafted, and conveyed. It’s surreal and impressionistic and deviously designed madness. It’s masterfully musical and cravenly peculiar and downright memorable.
But in the masterpiece, I still want something more than I’ve found in Lanthimos’ latest macabre bender of genres. In the decrees that this is the movie of the year, I can’t help but see a certain denial. I see the art critics who desperately want to fit in with the crowd in pretentious appreciation of splatter paint murals on museum walls.
But Poor Things is something more than arbitrary. Rather than random splotches of color strewn across the screen, it’s ingeniously crafted chaos. It’s purposeful ambiguity. The place in time is uncertain and shifts unsurely between what seems both like a distant past and a faraway future. A ship transporting characters from place to place spews a multi-colored smoke as it travels between curious, dystopian landscapes. Scenes and locales meld together. Color palettes change the grounded blends with the surreal.
An elderly Willem Defoe plays a mad scientist with a contorted face full of scars. At random intervals — and in bold indifference to the plot — he deposits grotesque bubbles of gas into the air.
Emma Stone earns all the praise she’s gotten for filling such an egregiously challenging role. Tasked with portraying a woman on a mental journey somewhere in between Flowers For Algernon and Frankenstein, Stone grows into brilliance and nearly falls apart. Throughout the nearly two-and-a-half-hour run time, she’s both stilted and dynamic.
One of the only constants in the plot is an overarching oddness. The score is one of the most overbearing, unnerving, and unwound I’ve ever had the fortune of hearing, and Jerskin Fendrix does an impeccable job of bringing the morose to life. But what life is in this movie is something few will find familiar. There’s hardly a lone character on screen throughout the film that behaves as people do. And with saucer-shaped crafts hovering idly through an alien sky, we’re left to wonder whether we should even expect a second of normality from this star-studded cast trodding along such strange new terrain.
As Emma Stone’s character comes into her own as a person, she’s more bitingly honest than Jennifer Garner in The Invention of Lying. Battling with the equivalent of a truth serum on steroids, her candor is something almost painful to behold.
Even while it’s a movie that could hardly be better at what it does, I can’t help but ask: is entertainment the chief function of these films? It’s not every movie that’s amusing, or tragic, or riotous. Some films are best considered in the same light as paintings hung upon a wall. But when entertainment falls as far from sight as it does in Beau Is Afraid, Saltburn, and Poor Things, I can’t help but spend a portion of the movie perplexed.
Maybe it’s just the impatient millennial in me who struggles to find resonance in this growing band of movies that seem to treat a squirming audience as its prime directive. But when old men repeatedly belch bubbles and the sky turns more colors than in Alice In Wonderland, I don’t think I’m the only viewer asking more questions than finding answers.
And while much of me revels in the mystery and artistry that brings Poor Things to life, I don’t think I’ll look forward to this raucous revisit more than most mindless Marvel movies. And I don’t think it will fill that same warm place in my heart as It’s a Wonderful Life, Forrest Gump, Shawshank Redemption, Harry Potter, or Toy Story.
But not every movie is meant to entertain crowds, stir souls, jerk tears, or warm hearts. Some are meant to be exactly as they are and evoke exactly what they evoke. Whatever perverse dream Tony McNamara had in writing the film, it’s one that Lanthimos realized in jaw-dropping spades. As a work of art, it’s difficult to deny that Poor Things leaves a lasting impression.
There’s a risk that these sorts of movies run in raising more confusion than clarity. Many viewers will recognize greatness even as they struggle through unceasing fits of vertigo. They’ll be taken for an unremitting cinematic ride but still spend much of it yearning for more solid ground beneath their feet. When too much is left open for interpretation, it can be overwhelming. The cloud of confusion is an effective device, but when the fog is too thick it can leave even the most astute viewer scrambling for context.
Poor Things is a movie that stands on shaky legs. In moments, it forfeits its legs entirely and floats freely without direction. The spastic and unmoored progression of the plot is both jarring and disorienting. But nearly every shot cinematographer Robbie Ryan employs is a neatly packed part in a grand tapestry of confusion and disorder. Every discordant note in Fendrix’s score is part of a slow-rolling arc of unease. Poor Things is an acid rainbow of a production and it’s delivered with the frightful precision of a puppetmaster.