One measure of the relevance of director / philosopher Yorgos Lanthimos' fantastic "immorality" tale Poor Things might be the number of viewers taken back by the sight of Emma Stone's untrimmed pubic hair and not by the bloody evisceration of corpses -- both make frequent appearances in this striking and hilarious film. These responses would suggest that people have less tolerance for graphic presentations of women's sexuality than they do for butchering the human corpus.
Stone plays Bella Baxter, a Victorian-era revivified victim of suicide, a Frankensteinian experiment into which the ghastly Dr. Godwin "God" Baxter (Willem Dafoe) has implanted a baby's brain. Baxter is raising the full-grown Bella as his daughter with the help of a young medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), who falls for Bella's beauty and innocence.
Bella is intellectually and emotionally arrested, at first, but then her brain begins to grow rapidly, along with her raven hair. The doctor fears Bella, who has been sheltered from the world, won't survive outside of his London estate. He intends for Max to marry Bella, and the couple would then never leave.
Baxter's plan is disrupted when the wolfish Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) takes Bella, who has developed an insatiable sexual appetite, on a tour of foreign cities. Once away from "God" and Max, Bella starts to learn about the ways of the world, that is, the ways of men. And, because Bella has not been conditioned by social conventions, she responds in ways that seem both "radical" and "rational," traits not commonly demonstrated by "decent" women of the period.
Stone, an Oscar winner for La La Land, is wonderful as the science experiment who grew into a fully actualized woman, taking full ownership of her mind and body in a world that despite Lanthimos's visually stunning production elements -- eye-popping sets and costumes -- is not far removed from the real.
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