Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, “Poor Things” is a madcap romp through a woman’s journey of self-discovery. This marks the filmmaker’s third collaboration with Emma Stone after she starred in “The Favourite” and a silent short, “Bleat.” The film bagged the prestigious Golden Lion at the 2023 Venice Film Festival and garnered Stone a Golden Globe, BAFTA, and her second Oscar. Lanthimos assembles rock-solid creative teams in every department to present a wild, spunky, and dazzlingly inventive vision.
An adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, the film is a revisionist spin on the Frankenstein template where its heroine, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), gradually discovers morality, consciousness, and what constitutes humanity. The film traces her growth from being a fully grown woman with the intelligence of a baby to a complex, sentient individual who is finally enlightened by all the baggage and despair of humanity.
Poor Things (2023) Movie Summary & Plot Synopsis:
The film opens in Victorian England but is accentuated with a steampunk twist. A brilliant, eccentric scientist, Godwin (Willem Dafoe), invites one of his students, Max (Ramy Youssef), home. Max is startled to find a woman whom Godwin calls his daughter Bella, but one with a peculiar disposition. One would almost think of her as a retard or an imbecile. Her speech is half-formed, and her gait is mechanical. Godwin informs Max of Bella’s tragic backstory. She was a woman who leaped off a bridge to die. Godwin rescued her when she hadn’t had rigor mortis set in. She also happened to be pregnant. This sparked a flurry of ideas in Godwin, who set about reanimating her corpse by putting the child’s brain in hers.
Godwin has hired Max to be his assistant in tracking Bella’s rapidly accelerating progress. Bella is constantly yearning for new sensations and quickly discovers the art of sexual pleasure. Bella’s relationship with her body informs the unfurling journey over the course of the film. Although Bella gets betrothed to Max, she has no inkling of social contracts nor the binds of morality. She decides to leave home and venture out into the world with a cad, Duncan (Mark Ruffalo). It is an ill-advised match, but she is too drawn to exploration.
Bella accompanies Duncan on a global expedition. While she readily gets intimate with a host of men, Duncan is upset and bothered. He takes her aboard a ship, thinking of it as a more closed environment. But this is where Bella starts having friends and develops her first tentative steps towards consciousness. When a friend shows her a sight of misery, she is overcome with emotion. Knowledge slowly creeps up on her, and the weight of guilt tags her. She gives money to the crew guards for distributing them among the poor. However, she is cheated. Subsequently, Bella and Duncan are forced to get off the ship as they no longer have any money.
They arrive in Paris, which is where Bella turns to sex work to find a livelihood. She also starts attending medical classes, and her thirst for knowledge sharpens. Sex work isn’t desirable for her. She wishes to develop a connection with the men before getting intimate and wants choice in her bed partners, but anyway, she values the situation above any other where men exercise command over her and make her their property.
As she dives deep into philosophy, politics, and science, she builds her rhetorical skills and a knack for rational debate. This stage marks the final one in her evolution into a human being. Soon, she receives a letter from Max informing her of Godwin’s deteriorating health. She decides to visit him, where she demands the entire story of her past from him. Max and Bella eventually rebuild their relationship, and the two get married.
Poor Things (2023) Movie Ending Explained:
Why Does Bella Go With Alfie?
At the marriage ceremony, Duncan bursts in, bringing the man who was Bella’s husband when she was Victoria. Alfie (Christopher Abbott) demands she go with him. Bella agrees and goes with him to his family estate, curious to know more about her past. Alfie is extremely controlling and violent, and we realize Bella had never wanted the baby and that all of it was foisted on her by Alfie. She also realizes she used to be a woman with a taste for violence if Alfie is to be believed. Bella learns that he plans to rip out her private parts so that she has no more sexual urges and will stick to his side.
Somehow, Bella manages to escape after shooting him in the foot. She brings him to the Baxter mansion. As Godwin dies, Bella decides not to kill Alfie despite Max’s insistence. She keeps him alive by implanting a goat’s brain into his. The film ends with a triumphant assertion where Bella has achieved complete freedom and mastery over the house.
Poor Things (2023) Movie Themes Explained:
Feminist Agency and Assertion
The film is a strong espousal of an unflinching feminist agency. As Bella journeys into a fully formed consciousness, she confronts patriarchal rhetoric and tendencies of containing and owning women. She begins as an anomaly who is alien to social rules, slowly discovering the world plays by the rules determined and established by men. But Bella refuses to have any of it. She disrupts the agenda of Duncan to dictate the scope of her actions. Bella emerges as one who decides the terms of their engagement. She removes him from her life when he becomes an overbearing presence in her life.
Through Stone’s miraculous performance, the film firmly reinstates a woman’s right to her body and chooses whatever she wishes to do with it. Max is the good male ally in her quest for liberation, who understands her and doesn’t stand in her way. Even though she is married to Max, she refuses to be bound to any social expectation or code, viewing them as entirely disposable. Men are secondary to Bella’s growth as she seizes on a wide spectrum of emotion and sensation.
