Poor Things

Mansplaining feminism

Yorgos Lanthimos first made a splash with Dogtooth, a sharp high concept movie that takes place in a house with four people. It’s about an authoritarian father who controls his children by keeping them at home and changing the names of things; a brilliant parable of fascism. This is somewhat reminiscent of Poor Things, a fairy tale fantasy set in Victorian times in which Godwin Baxter, a scientist (Willem Dafoe) experiments with humans and reanimates a woman, Bella (Emma Stone), a sort of prurient female Frankenstein, who calls him “God” for short. This is when you realize the movie is not going to be subtle.

The first half hour is fun as Bella, who has the body of a young woman but the mind of a baby, exhibits unfiltered childish behaviors while she learns to navigate the world. God, the Father, makes every decision about her life, from keeping her inside the house, to engaging her to marry his assistant (Ramy Youssef). Bella soon discovers her sexual urges, and though she is not fully mentally developed, she is quite excited about playing with her body, mostly in public. Duncan Wedderburn, a lawyer hired to look over the marriage contract arrives on the scene (Mark Ruffalo, spectacularly miscast) and since he is a libertine, whisks Bella away from her home and takes her on a sexual adventure. This is a movie of ideas about a woman’s bodily and psychic autonomy and about…