The foremost curveball of the 2023-24 awards season is Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos's big-screen translation of Alasdair Gray's 1992 novel. The popularity of Lanthimos-brand weirdness has long been a source of some puzzlement in this parish, but popular it undeniably is. 2009's borderline deranged Dogtooth landed an Oscar nomination; 2015's The Lobster spoke to a young audience negotiating the absurdities and cruelties of today's dating scene; and 2018's The Favourite closed in on $100m at the box office while actually winning awards, despite having nothing much more than weirdness in Sandy Powell frocks to sustain it. (That film's dramatic limitations would subsequently be shown up by TV's The Great, where Favourite screenwriter Tony McNamara was inspired to push beyond funny-strange and into the realms of funny-ha ha, and to point it all in the direction of legible social commentary.) Success has granted Lanthimos the budgets to do stranger things besides, and to encourage bigger names still to act weird for him: the constituent elements of Gray's book, an odd, slippery fable about female autonomy and the men who would try to contain it, are here pinned down under Robbie Ryan's fish-eye lens, set to a wonky-plonky broken-toy score guaranteed to wind you up something rotten if you're not totally on board, and stitched into what is, effectively, Frankenstein with full-frontal nudity. I'll give Poor Things this: it's an awards contender that neither looks, sounds nor moves like an awards contender, and one that lands upon scenes Oscar would never have been allowed near in days of yore. I'll also confess that I found much of it insufferable, its theme-park eccentricity suggesting no more than a Wonka for wankers.
That erratic movement is dictated by the film's monstrously innocent heroine: one Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), brain of a baby transplanted into the body of a fully-grown woman. From her first faltering steps on screen, it's clear Lanthimos's Bella has been conceived as both toddler and explorer, in the way most newborns are, with no sense of boundaries nor the dangers that lie beyond them. She's a promising protagonist for a movie - you genuinely feel she could totter anywhere after a while - and also a neat fit for the Lanthimos project, drawn as it has been towards transgression and taboo. "In polite society, that is not done," Bella is chided, after an incident with a cucumber at the breakfast table; upon hearing a baby wailing in a restaurant, her first response is to stride over with the intention of punching the brat clean out. Her pure instinct knows not the reason of the rational men of science closing ranks around her. But all Lanthimos and the returning McNamara can really think to do with Bella Baxter is to have her tossed from one of these men to the next: a disfigured surgeon/father figure she refers to as God (Willem Dafoe, under latex that suggests some hybrid of the Hopkins and Hurt roles in Lynch's The Elephant Man), an earnest clinician observer (Ramy Youssef, representing the normies), a passing cad (Mark Ruffalo, giving the single worst performance of his entire career), a succession of varyingly manky clients during Bella's drift into sex work, and finally a late arrival (Christopher Abbott) who drags Bella back to her former life and Lanthimos back to The Favourite's overstuffed drawing rooms. Round and round they all go: two hours of proto-Tinder swipes, held together solely by Lanthimos's now-familiar, ever-more-insistent blankness of tone. Bare-bones narrative; scant interest in subtext or internal states; not much idea of how all this free-floating grotesquerie might connect to the real world.
The problem with Poor Things is that it so clearly began life in horror-adjacent territory: a story about the terrible ways we can treat one another, the damage we wreak on perishable flesh, the scars we carry and leave behind. But it's been adapted by career sniggerers, and sniggering is both as close as the film summons to a coherent editorial line, and all it can really think to elicit by way of effect. Stone, a fine comic performer, commits to it, using Bella's convoluted body language and blunt dirty talk to convey a haphazard kind of growth, but she's more exhausting than fun to watch here. (It's one of those occasions where the Best Actress award will likely go to the Most Acting.) And just as Bella appears at the mercy of the men in her world, so too Stone seems to be performing with one eye on her director; whether in Shirley Temple dresses or steampunk bondage gear, this performance raises only one question, and it's "what do you want from me, daddy?" We might be reassured if we felt she had a more reliable guide, but Lanthimos seems stuck in the same creative rut as Wes Anderson, praised to the rafters by an audience with an algorithmic view of art, which wants only one thing from their creatives, over and over again, in scene after scene and film after film. The studios can throw all the money they want at this problem, but the weirdness hasn't developed any, and maybe cannot develop, being just another form of arrested development, a phase too profitable for the arthouse to pass beyond. There are ways of dressing it up - Poor Things offers more outré spectacle in passing than the austere Dogtooth did - but Lanthimos is still fundamentally trading in the same strange combinations of words and exaggeratedly angular gestures, left to settle altogether flatly on the screen. The audience coming out for that doesn't want fully-rounded films so much as fetish videos; and making them bigger and louder, with greater huffing and puffing from the actors and ten times more production design, isn't ever likely to win over those of us who don't share this particular kink.
Poor Things opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.
