This episode originally aired on December 21, 2023.
I regret to inform you that Poor Things is one of the best movies of the year.
Now, obviously I don’t regret that. But I never thought the day would come when I’d have to give it up for director Yorgos Lanthimos, whose work I’ve never loved, and I’ve occasionally loathed. And so I’m not sure what to do with this new possibility that maybe he’s good now.
Part of the success of Poor Things is in the screenplay, by Tony McNamara, who it seems is having a good influence on Lanthimos. It tells us of a woman named Bella, who was, in a sense, developed from intellectual and emotional infancy while inhabiting the body of a grown woman. This feat was achieved by the scientist Godwin Baxter, whose experiments result in all manner of wonders, including various halves of various animals stitched together that run around his garden. Baxter’s face is also clearly stitched together, a benefit of his own father’s experiments when Baxter was a boy.
Don’t worry if this isn’t making any sense—in the course of the film, it mostly does, and much of the glory is in the enormous delights we enjoy through its consistent surprise as Bella develops and sees the world, in all its beauty and horror. And the world Lanthimos creates is part of those delights, with off-center, manufactured versions of the great cities, and a sky that’s covered by the entire Milky Way.
Lanthimos retains some of his visual crutches from earlier films, particularly his unnecessary fish-eye lenses, but here, they work much better, because so much of what we’re seeing is already sprung from a wild imagination. And unlike in his previous movies, the director isn’t simply treating his characters as his own playthings. Here, he really seems to care about them, and it makes so much difference. We all have the capacity to grow, and if this is the new Yorgos Lanthimos, then as surprised as I am to say this, I welcome him with open arms.
Poor Things is streaming on Hulu.
