A sexual-perversion comedy for our times
The basic response to any Yorgos Lanthimos film is repulsion. Anyone delighted by Poor Things, his smirky, smutty uglification of The Bride of Frankenstein, falls for his usual depravity.
Lanthimos’s latest squalid fancy is a wicked simplification of feminine sex drive. It starts when British mad scientist Dr. Baxter (Willem Dafoe with a mutilated Elephant Man face) pauses from vivisecting cadavers to crudely resurrect a female suicide he renames Bella, giving her the brain of her aborted child (dark-haired Emma Stone imitating Frankenhooker gestures).
Bella’s infantile verbal communication, awkward motor skills, and libidinal compulsion startle Victorian hypocrites. She becomes the consort of degenerate lawyer Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, doing a bad Terry-Thomas), and they set off on a tour of Europe, practicing debauchery.
Whereas the 1935 movie The Bride of Frankenstein extended a subplot from the original novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, playfully satirizing her proto-feminism, Lanthimos gets gross — adapting Alasdair Gray’s 1992 parody novel that bowdlerized Shelley’s warning against “the new Prometheus.” He demonizes patriarchy through Bella’s reference to re-animator Baxter as “God,” whom she defies in search of attaining physical satisfaction. (“In some ways, it would be a relief to be rid of my questing self.”) Lanthimos reduces Bella’s identity to her glands.
Lanthimos’s previous films — The Favourite, The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Dogtooth — were also repugnant social satires, attempting Kubrickian irony. This time, Victorian-era stylization indicates a bigger budget than the one The Favourite devoted to deriding the Stuart dynasty. His exaggerated, fish-eye lens suggests pornographic Monty Python drawings (or Tim Burton for pervs). In this sense, the blatant emphasis on sex — Bella and Wedderburn’s sojourn leads to her stint in a Parisian brothel where she discovers lesbian sisterhood — strikes a Hunter Biden chord. It’s a celebration of moral rot but with feminist coloration.
Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara (who also wrote The Favourite) use faux-British vernacular and kinky anachronisms to emulate the New Norm.
These characters are cynical monsters whose behavior accords with Hollywood progressivism but distorts reality. The diversity-inclusion-equity (DIE) casting includes pessimistic black characters — a socialist prostitute, Toinette (Suzy Bemba), who brings Bella to orgasm, and Harry (Jerrod Carmichael), a male escort to Hanna Schygulla’s jaded matron, who observes, “We are all cruel beasts. Born that way, die that way.” These contemporized freaks are especially offensive when whites still don’t understand blacks and women don’t understand men. Nihilist Harry summarizes: “Don’t expect religion, socialism, capitalism. We are a fucked species.”
We are the poorer for Lanthimos’s trashy version of social and sexual progress. Bella represents the worst aspects of feminism — profane explicitness (“furious jumping,” “the tongue play you were about to perform”) — and the indulgence of sexual excess as if that is what defines human beings, particularly women. Bella is threatened with clitorectomy by her former husband, who proclaims, “The root of your problem is between your legs. I shall have it off.”
Poor Things teases fear porn, using outrage as comedy, because Lanthimos lacks genuine sophistication, the genius that distinguished sex comedies by Ernst Lubitsch, Howard Hawks, Sacha Guitry, Leo McCarey, Blake Edwards, Bertrand Blier — or even Norah Ephron’s po-faced rom-coms.
Lanthimos mistakes depravity for cleverness. This is the essence of bad art. He plays misogyny (“You’re becoming the very thing I hate, a grasping succubus of a love”) against misandry: the former showcased in Bella’s victimization by horrible males, as in an incestuous brothel episode that has a customer initiating his sons. The latter is evident in Bella’s vengeance, which leads her to mutate her ex-husband into a chicken-dog hybrid. Poor Things might have been amusing if it didn’t offer hideous justifications for the worst human behavior. We mutate ourselves with diseased entertainments.