“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful,” says the monster in Mary Shelley’s iconic novel, Frankenstein. It could be the mantra of the main character, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), in Yorgos Lanthimos's Golden Globe-winning Poor Things, based on a retelling of Shelley's famous Victorian, Prometheus myth masterpiece. The screenplay, written by Tony McNamara, is based on Alasdair Gray’s award-winning 1992 novel which replaces Frankenstein's hideous monster with a gorgeous, perfectly proportioned woman-child, let loose on the world when her uncontainable spirit of adventure propels her beyond the safe confines of her creator's comfortable, yet extremely strange London home.
We soon learn that she is the product of a fanatical experiment conducted by an aptly named medical scientist, Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), whom Bella tellingly nicknames God for short. Rather serendipitously, the body of a suicide victim is delivered to the doctor's door, barely dead and with a living foetus inside her, whose brain is unscrupulously transplanted into its mother's body. You can tell it's not the doctor's first rodeo by the menagerie of wabi-sabi creatures he's Frankensteined together — goose/bulldog, duck/goat, pig/chicken — and by his acumen with a scalpel when dissecting bodies in student medical classes.
As his face obviously belies, Dr Baxter likes cutting things up. Dafoe's tenderly inhabited and complex character is both a man in noble pursuit of the empirical tenets of science, and monster, eternally damaged by his own father's curiosity and endless experimentation, for which his mangled body (and mutilated mind) have paid the price.
At first, Baxter's most revolutionary creation is a blank slate on which he can project a reflection of himself, but soon the woman-child develops free will and an uncontainable sexuality. God explains to his assistant, Dr McCandles (Ramy Youssef), that Bella was brought to life as an experiment in the art of transference and resurrection. The first indication that she is more than that is when she attacks them both for refusing her an ice cream once she's demanded to see the outside world. The second is when she discovers masturbation. Then all bets are off.
What follows is a journey of liberation for Bella, during which she transforms from innocence to experience, like the subjects of William Blake's poetry, understanding suffering, humiliation, cruelty and the unfairness of the world. Stone's very physical performance reflects Bella's development as she gains control over the co-ordination of her body. At first, she can hardly move, then walks on stiff limbs with her tummy distended like a toddler until she's mastered her limbs and moving becomes easy and natural for her.
In parallel is the story of Bella's sexual development and her relationship with the other characters who variously try to instruct her, contain her, keep her safe, exploit her, inspire her, educate her, love her, idolise her, trap her, set her free, mutilate her, manipulate her and objectify her. As David Fear writes in Rolling Stone magazine, the film is also like a throwback comedy of manners that revolves around a particularly repressive era’s attitudes towards women. “The fairer sex may be married, imprisoned, fetishised, objectified, forced into motherhood, and treated like property. But they mustn’t feel physical pleasure. That way lies madness... for men.”
Brilliantly epitomising this madness is the “cocksman”, Duncan Wedderburn, played by inspiringly by Mark Ruffalo, embracing — as Fear brilliantly describes — “his inner petulant asshole”. Wedderburn, in stealing Bella away from her paternalistic carers, Dr Baxter and his assistant, whom she's agreed to marry, sets out to take advantage of Bella's innocent enjoyment of what she calls “furious jumping”. He gets a helluva lot more than he bargained for.
Ruffalo's over-the-top performance, though totally satirical, was the best of the film for me. Quite hilariously camp, Wedderburn is reflective of a certain gentleman of the Victorian era reflections of whom exist to this day. Ruffalo's pathetic cad, come lovestruck moron, is going onto my list of top film characters of all time. He has the patois down to a fine art — delivering his fabulous dialogue through his front teeth and smiling while he scowls sarcastically, “Right, you've become the very thing that I hate; a grasping succubus of a lover. I've pried many of them off me ... and now I'm it!”
The dance scene that ensues shortly after this dialogue also makes it onto my list of the best movie scenes of all-time. It's a clever, physical performance of the relationship between the two characters; Bella's naive desire for honesty, forthrightness and freedom and Duncan's desire to control her and contain her childlike outbursts in public. It transparently exposes what Freud would say society demands we repress.
Lanthimos's Poor Things stitches together genres, themes and ideas to create an exquisite monster of a film that, like its lead character is, by turns utterly charming, grotesquely horrific, belly-laugh funny, bluntly pornographic, violently vengeful, sumptuously crafted and as seductively intriguing as a car crash.
It’s one of the few films I seriously considered rewatching from the start when the final credits rolled. Bella's constant refrain throughout the film is, “I want to discover more.” She makes me feel the same way.
• Poor Things is in cinemas from this week
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