Poor Things: A young girl’s strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk

Read at Movie Night!

Years ago, I saw The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) and hated everything about it, even though it featured one of my favorites: Alicia Silverstone. There were other actors playing weightier roles in that movie, but as someone who spent entire summers watching MTV in the early 90s, I only cared about Alicia, the hero of three groundbreaking Aerosmith videos (Cryin’, Amazing, and Crazy). She doesn’t get to be in a lot of movies, so it offended me that the director, Yorgos Lanthimos, made a movie even less watchable than Batman & Robin (1997), which had famously wounded George Clooney’s career but proved fatal to Alicia’s.?

I stopped paying attention to Yorgos Lanthimos after this. No, more precisely, I paid just enough attention to avoid his movies in the way that you need a modicum of awareness to avoid stepping on dogshit on the sidewalk. Even with all the awards it won, I wouldn’t have watched Poor Things if it wasn’t on Hulu on an evening when I had nothing to do. I temporarily canceled my vendetta against Yorgos and sent a mental apology to Alicia the way devout Christians send one to Jesus before dicking down. I was surprised Poor Things was fun to watch. I didn’t think Yorgos had this in him. I was shocked when I realized Yorgos Lanthimos had, to great acclaim, recreated Rochelle, Rochelle, the fictional movie from Seinfeld. You know, the one about “a young girl's strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk.”?

Poor Things is about the mostly sexual adventures of a woman who was, in a roundabout way, brought back to life by Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) after committing suicide. The woman was brain dead, so the doctor, who has the skills and moral flexibility of Dr. Frankenstein and the physical appearance of his monster, swapped out her dead brain with the viable brain of the near-grown fetus in her womb.?

This woman-child named Bella by the doctor grows quickly, rapidly gaining speech and motor functions. From the start, she is unrestrained by the rules of polite society, pursuing her own pleasures, be they pulling on a cadaver’s rubbery penis before joyfully stabbing its eyes or masturbating whenever and wherever (is this what Shakira was going on about?). When she discovers sex, her world literally explodes into technicolor.?

Going boldly where her libido sends her, Bella runs blindly into danger without harm. She’s protected by the kind of grace that surrounds young drunks who get home safely without remembering how. You watch the movie knowing she lives a charmed life, but wonder if she is somehow fated to repeat her previous death.

One of the dangers Bella encounters early on is Mark Ruffalo as Duncan Wedderburn, a mustachioed rake who looks like the type to tie damsels to train tracks in silent movies. My favorite line of his tells us everything we need to know about him: “You've just been thrice fucked by the very best. It's probable no other man will ever bring you to the raptures I have. I feel bad for you.” I think a lovably immoral Mark Ruffalo is the best Mark Ruffalo. I also loved him as the would-be homewrecker in The Kids Are All Right (2010). Sweet-faced Ramy Youssef plays Max McCandles, Bella’s seemingly well-intentioned fiance, who is much more genial but also far more dangerous than Duncan since he’s willing to accept any kind of precondition to marry her, including agreeing to lock her behind closed doors for the rest of her life.

Poor Things is easy to watch. This sounds like faint praise, but it’s not. Too many movies take effort, and I’ll be fucked if I have to work for my entertainment. Yorgos gets it right this time. The characters and even the scenery are fun, quirky, and inherently entertaining. The dialog is hilarious. The costumes--and I generally don’t think about costumes--are ludicrous but always perfect. Don’t let the accolades or Yorgos’s previous works scare you. This is a fun movie, but be forewarned: I’m not kidding when I say there’s a ton of sex. Emma Stone is naked and humping all the time, and that’s barely an exaggeration.? Don’t make plans to watch this with your folks or your pals from bible study.?