We Need To Talk About What Poor Things Is Actually Doing

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Millennial Moving Mob. Cute. The lights. Let it roll. Yeah. We're diving in it all, every frame, every job. Breaking it down with the mob. Film analysis. Yeah, we go deeper.

Speaker B: 00:00:16

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Millennial Movie Mob, a place for movie lovers who cannot just watch a film and move on with their lives.

I'm your host, Amanda Blossom, and this podcast is about movies that get under your skin, burrow in, and set up camp in your brain for weeks. Everything from Oscar darlings to cult classics to the films that made you feel things you didn't even have words for. Yet.

Today, we're talking about Poor Things, and I'm just gonna say it up front. I do not know how to talk about a movie without spoiling it, so consider yourself warned. Intense spoilers.

From here on out, if you have not seen it, go watch it, come back, and let's talk, because we have a lot to talk about. I'll be honest with you. Poor Things is a lot. It is visually overwhelming in the best possible way.

It is funny and disturbing and tender and deeply gloomy, gloriously weird. And it has things to say about women and bodies and autonomy and the world. And I am still chewing on all of that. I loved parts of it fiercely.

Other parts made me genuinely uncomfortable. And I think. I really think that discomfort is exactly the point. But here's the thing. I keep coming back to the image that won't leave me alone.

The film opens with a woman jumping off a bridge into a river, choosing to disappear, and it ends with a woman in a garden, surrounded by books, building exactly the life she chose, that journey from darkness into a world that gets more vivid, more real, more alive, the more she inhabits it. That's the spine of the whole story. That is what we're following. We're going to get into all of it today.

The film, the book it's based on, the craft, the controversy, and the big, messy feminist question at the center of the whole thing. Ready? Let's go. All right, so what is this movie?

Favorite, and it's based on a: 1992

It won the golden lion at Venice and went on to get 11 Academy Award nominations, winning four Best Actress for Emma Stone, best production design, best costume design, and best makeup and hair styling. Emma Stone's win was her second Oscar, and in her acceptance speech, she said something I love. It's not about me.

It's about a team that came together to make something greater than the sum of its parts. And that is the best part about making movies, is all of us together. And she is not wrong.

Every single department in this film is doing exceptional, visionary work. And it all coheres into something that feels genuinely singular. There is nothing else quite like poor things. So what is it?

At its most basic, it's a reimagining of Frankenstein. A pregnant woman throws herself into a river and commits suicide.

Her body is recovered by a brilliant and grotesque surgeon named Godwin Baxter, played by Willem Dafoe, who reanimates her by replacing her brain with the brain of the infant she was carrying.

The result is Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone, a fully grown woman's body inhabited by a baby's brain, who grows and learns and experiences the world at a rapid, accelerated rate, completely free of the social conditioning the rest of us spend our entire lives absorbing. And here's the thing the film is doing quietly from the very first frame.

It's a story about someone waking up, not metaphorically waking up to herself, literally from nothing, from death into a world she has to learn from scratch, that she encounters without the filter of who she was told to be. Every experience lands on Bella. Raw, direct, unmediated, fully felt. That is an extraordinary position to be in.

It is also, depending on how you read it, a terrifying one. It is wild, it is controversial, and it is one of the most talked about films of the last several years.

One thing I want to flag before we go further. The book and the film tell this story very differently.

The novel is narrated by McCandles, the male character called Archibald in the book and Max in the film. And we experience Bella entirely through his filtered, subjective perspective. The film flips this completely. The movie is Bella's story.

From Bella's point of view, that shift changes everything. And we'll come back to it. Let's talk about the world this film builds and how it builds it.

Before we even get into what happens, I need to talk about the world this film creates because it is extraordinary and it does not happen by accident. Lanthimos shot almost the entire film on a soundstage in Budapest. Every city, London, Lisbon, Paris, was built from scratch as a surrealist fantasy.

Yellow cobblestone streets, a deep navy steamship, a London that looks like someone crossed a Victorian illustration with a fever dream and ran it through a gaudy filter.

Production designers James Price and Shauna Heath described wanting to create a cinematic terrarium, a sealed, constructed world, and they delivered a terrarium, a container, a world you're Inside of looking out through glass. Hold that image.

Cinematographer Robbie Ryan used fisheye lenses, including a 4 millimeter optic lens designed for 16 millimeter film and adapted to 35 millime. That created this porthole effect, like you're watching the world through a curved and slightly wrong window.

The wide angle shots make every backdrop enormous and extravagant, making Bella look small and wonderstruck inside a world that is vast and surreal and slightly threatening. And crucially, the early parts of the film are in black and white. Cold, clinical, artificial.

And then, at a very specific moment, the film cuts to color. Lush and saturated, overwhelming color. It is Dorothy stepping into Oz. And we'll get to that in a moment. The score was composed by Jerskin Fendrix.

And this was his debut film score, which is just insane to me because it is so accomplished. It is dissonant, wobbly, intentionally off balance, warped woodwinds, erratic strings.

He described creating what he called a foghorn harp made of bike horns. And here's something I love. 95% Of the score was composed before filming even began, based on the script alone.

The music wasn't added in after it deeply informed the scenes that they were part of. You can feel that the music in this film isn't decorating the story. It is is part of the story.

The costumes by Holly Waddington are doing thematic work the entire film. Bella dresses like a child, putting together an outfit from a lost and found. Pieces that don't quite go, but assembled with total confidence.

Victorian silhouettes mixed with modern fabrics. Latex knickers worn as outerwear and deliberately, specifically, symbolically, no corsets.

Her wardrobe represents a woman who has never been told her body needs to be shaped or constrained. As she grows, her clothes get more considered, but they never conform. She is always slightly outside whatever context she is in.

Godwin's makeup took over 2 hours and 40 minutes to apply every day. Prosthetic silicone pieces, creating a face that looks like the result of a surgical experiment. Because within the story, that's exactly what it is.

His deformities are the direct result of his father's performing experiments on him as a child. He did to Bella what was done to him. That's a detail the film gives you quietly and just lets you sit with.

Lanthimos has talked about his approach, and there's a quote that really gets at the philosophy of the whole film. He said, when I watch something and I'm being told too many things and being told to feel a certain way, I have a bad reaction.

And that is exactly what poor things doesn't do. It does not tell you how to feel. It creates conditions. It builds a world.

It puts you in Bella's porthole view of it and lets you experience it with her. It is, in that sense, designed to do what Bella does, give you direct experience instead of mediated instruction. The form matches the content.

The film itself is a kind of waking up. Let's talk about the story, Bella Baxter and her five stages.

Okay, let's actually walk through what happens, because this story is delightful and strange, and I want us all on the same page before we get into the bigger ideas. We open on title credits stitched in white linen, already beautiful and handmade. And then we see Emma Stone in blue, diving headfirst into a river.

This is Victoria Blessington throwing herself off a bridge. We don't know that yet. We just see a body choosing oblivion, a consciousness choosing to disappear.

And then she comes back, not as herself, as something new. Cut to Bella at the piano, clunking notes with absolutely no melody. This is the state of her brain. She is a baby in a grown woman's body.

She pounds her silverware at dinner. She breaks plates just to see what happens. She pees on the floor. She is, in every behavioral sense, an infant.

And she also happens to be in a beautiful, fully adult body. That tension is the whole film.

What strikes me about this early Bella, and I'll come back to this idea more in depth later, is how purely she encounters everything. There is no layer between her and experience. She touches the world and the world touches her back.

No shame, no filter, no context about what things are supposed to mean. She is someone for whom everything is happening for the first time, and it is genuinely delightful and genuinely unsettling to watch.

Godwin, whom Bella calls God, which is completely apt. Because he literally gave her life, is her father figure and creator.

Willem Dafoe plays him with this extraordinary combination of grotesqueness and genuine tenderness. He reads to Bella in his arms.

He takes her on carriage rides to explain the world, when she has a tantrum because she wants ice cream, and he explains that people will stare at his face and she goes, God, lovely like dog face, and barks at him before tantruming again. It is honestly one of the sweetest, funniest and most jarring moments in the film.

Max McCandles arrives as a young medical student and a fan of Godwin's work, and he is immediately smitten with Bella. He studies her development. He proposes. Bella wants to, and I will use her exact words, touch each other's genital pieces.

Max says they must wait until their wed. She agrees, but first she wants to see the world. Enter Duncan Wedderburn. Mark Ruffalo, playing the most gloriously detestable man.

A slick, arrogant lawyer who spots Bella and immediately maneuvers to take her away from everyone who loves her. He tells her she's a prisoner he aims to free. He is absolutely not acting in her interest, he is acting in his own.

And Bella, love her, knows this, or rather doesn't care. She announces to Godwin, completely matter of factly, that she is running away with Duncan. At midnight she will marry Max.

After she has experienced Duncan, she chloroforms Max. When he tries to talk her out of it, she kisses Godwin on the cheek and she leaves.

Godwin, bless him, sews emergency money into the lining of her clothes. And the film cuts to color. Bella's first real experience of sex with another person. And the world opens.

The black and white gives way to this explosion of saturated color. Golden streets of Lisbon, deep blue sea. The full, surreal extravagance of the film's constructed Europe. It is gorgeous and it is a choice.

The film is saying that this is when the world becomes vivid. Not when Bella reads a book, not when she has a philosophical revelation, when she has sex with a man. That is when everything floods with color.

We'll come back to why that choice is worth talking about. What follows is Bella's education. Not just sexual, but intellectual, emotional, philosophical, political.

She travels with Duncan through Lisbon and onto a ship where she meets an older woman named Martha and a man named Harry Astley, who introduce her to philosophy books and the complicated, ugly truth of how the world actually works. At Alexandria, she sees poverty and class inequality for the first time. Rich people eating above while people below are naked and starving.

And it shatters her completely. She takes Duncan's gambling winnings and gives the money to a ship worker to give to the poor.

And she almost certainly got conned, but her heart was entirely in the right place. Every one of these encounters lands on Bella fully. She doesn't process poverty through theory. She sees it, she feels it. She acts.

Something in her is cracking open further with every experience, not breaking, opening, growing more awake. Duncan, meanwhile, is completely unraveling.

He told Bella earlier in the film not to fall in love with him, but he is now desperately puffy, pathetically in love with her. He literally puts her in a box on the ship to control her movements. He is furious every time she reads or learns or grows.

He liked her when she was too Naive to see through him, and he cannot handle the woman she is becoming. Ruffalo talked about how much the role scared him.

He said, it reminded me a lot of my early theater days, where I was just very courageous and kind of dangerous for some reason. Over the years, I've been keeping it very restrained. This is a part that no one would have expected me in.

He also said, I almost begged to get out of the performance. I was scared. But it's a good reason to do something when you're scared and you can feel that courage.

In every scene he's in, there's a moment where Duncan tries to drag a deck chair with an elderly woman sitting in it towards the edge of the ship, while the staff has to physically intervene. And Bella watches from a distance, giggling. It is both hilarious and a very precise portrait of a certain kind of man. They end up in Paris, broke.

Bella, with her characteristic pragmatic logic, decides to work at a brothel. She needs money. She has no problem with sex. She sees it as efficient. Her first client finishes quickly and she laughs.

She returns to Duncan with an eclair and tells him about it completely matter of factly. He calls her a whoring monster, a demon sent from hell.

And she reminds him, quite reasonably, that his constant odes to her beauty don't square with suddenly calling her ugly. She hands him her emergency money. Yes, she had emergency money the whole time. Tells him to go home, and he snatches it and storms out of her life.

Bella stays at the brothel. The madam is a complex, funny, tattooed woman who tells Bella she must experience degradation and horror and sadness to become whole.

Once on the other side. You will be grateful to this moment. You must keep going. Bella says, I want that.

She makes a friend, Twinette, a socialist sex worker who becomes her first female lover. She hangs out in anatomy classes because it feels like home. She keeps growing. A letter arrives and Godwin is dying. Come home. Bella comes home.

She confronts Godwin about her origins. Did she have a baby in her? And he explains everything. She is her own mother. Her baby's brain was given a second life in her dead mother's body.

She looks at the scar on the back of her neck with total new understanding. She calls them both monsters for lying to her, Godwin and Max. Then she forgives Godwin for the gift of life.

She finds being alive fascinating and announces she is going to be a doctor. Think about that scene for a second. She finds out the entire truth of her existence, and her response is not collapse, it is orientation.

She looks at where she came from, and it sharpens her sense of where she is going. That is not a person being defined by her origins. That is a person integrating them. Then Bella's past shows up at her wedding.

General Blessington, her former husband. As Victoria arrives to reclaim her, Bella goes to see what her former life was.

She finds a cruel man who tortures servants for sport and plans to surgically remove her clitoris to manage her sexual hysteria. Blessington pulls a gun on Bella with a chloroform martini meant for her to drink.

And Bella, completely fearless, tells him she'd rather be shot in the heart than drink the chloroform. She throws the drink in his face, takes the gun and shoots him in the foot. She calls Max to come remove the bullet and she is done with this chapter.

The film ends with Bella in the garden, Twinette and Felicity Godwin's other Frankenstein daughter beside her. Max smiling, books everywhere, learning, never stopping. Blessington living as a goat in the yard. Now it is a utopia of her own making.

It is exactly the ending she earned. Let's talk about Emma Stone for a minute because I think she deserves her own section.

This performance is extraordinary and I want to give it flowers. Stone described the challenge of the role in a way that really stuck with me.

She said, I thought this was an incredibly difficult role at first, and then I realized that the challenge was actually her simplicity. It was about taking away as much shame and self judgment as possible to see it through her eyes.

She also said, I think most people distracted by sex overlook the fact that she approaches sex and life like a scientist. It is a love letter to science. She also said, I just had the fear of not living up to how great this character is.

That last one gets me because the fear of not doing justice to a great character is exactly the right kind of fear to have. And Stone clearly channeled it into something remarkable. And here's what she actually delivers.

A performance that tracks a consciousness waking up in real time. Watch Bella's eyes in the early scenes. There's something genuinely unfocused about them, like a person who hasn't learned yet what to look at.

Watch them in the Paris scenes. Watch them in the garden at the end. Something is on behind those eyes that wasn't there before.

Stone tracks that accumulation of selfhood across two hours of screen time. And she does it mostly through physical detail, through micro adjustments, through the way she holds her body differently in each chapter.

It is one of the great physical performances in recent memory. Stone was also a producer on this film which matters.

She was deeply involved in every aspect of how Bella's story was told, including the intimate scenes, which she worked through carefully with intimacy coordinator Elle McAlpine. She said, we didn't want to be literal about this because the whole thing is a fairy tale and a metaphor.

So when it came to her physicality, there was a lot of opportunity for experimenting and inventing things.

She described the Intimacy coordinator as a safety net, a hand to hold, and said she felt completely in a safe space with enormous agency over every scene that matters. And we'll get to why in a minute. And of course, Mark Ruffalo, on working with her, said, she's so funny and she's so much fun.

She's such a great actor and a serious producer. She has the most ridiculous laugh. Yes, she does. Mark Ruffalo. Many of Bella's mannerisms were improvised.

The particular tilt of her head, the way her physicality shifts as she grows, the comic timing of her most unfiltered moments. Lanthimos has said Stone worked from Pure Instinct, and the Oscar was completely, totally earned.

Okay, now let's talk about the Born Sexy Yesterday problem. We need to talk about it.

Here's the elephant in the room, and I want to take it seriously because the controversy around poor things is real, and I think it deserves more than a dismissive wave. I want to credit the YouTube channel Final Girl Digital here.

Her analysis was incredibly helpful in thinking through this episode, and I'm going to be drawing on her ideas in this section.

The Born Sexy Yesterday trope is a pattern in film where a character has the mind of a child or innocent, but the body of a sexually attractive adult woman the character doesn't know the rules, can be manipulated, is endearingly naive, and also happens to be beautiful. It tends to be made for and consumed by a male gaze. And Bella Baxter fits this trope almost perfectly.

Literally, the film takes the metaphor and makes it medically literal. She has a baby's brain. She is innocent because she is neurologically an infant.

And she is also, from the very first scene, in a beautiful adult woman's body that the film depicts in many sexual situations. This is uncomfortable. It is supposed to make you uncomfortable. But Final Girl Digital makes a sharp point. Depiction is not the same as commentary.

Showing something is not the same as condemning or condoning it. And the discomfort the film generates, who does it actually reach?

She argues it makes the wrong people uncomfortable, people who already understood the problem, and that's worth sitting with. There's also a pointed observation she Makes about Frankenstein specifically. The original novel was written by Mary Shelley, a woman.

Her monster is male. He seeks knowledge first. He wants to understand the world, to connect, to belong.

When gender bent Frankenstein stories get made, when the monster is female, they almost always become sexual. The female monster is sexually desirable in a way the male monster simply is not. Why?

What does that tell us about who is writing these stories and who they imagine is watching? And the film makes the color shift happen at Bella's first sexual encounter with a man.

Again, not when she reads a book or discovers philosophy or experiences grief or awe or a political awakening. It's when she has sex with a man. That is when the world goes from black and white to color.

That is a directorial choice, and it's one you're allowed to have feelings about. Lanthimos himself, when asked about the film's message, said, it's exploring. There's no direct message.

I think it's mostly creating conditions for characters in situations where you reveal conflicts in human behavior, society around humans and humans themselves.

Which is either a genuinely honest statement about his artistic philosophy or a very convenient way to avoid accountability for the questions the film raises. Maybe both. But here's where I personally land, and I know this is debatable.

I think Poor Things is ultimately more subversive than it is exploitative. And here's why. Bella cannot be controlled. Every single man in this film who tries to control her fails. Duncan boxes her in, she escapes.

Blessington pulls a gun, she takes it. Godwin chloroforms her in the carriage. She chloroforms Max right back. She uses her sexuality on her own terms, not as a service to male fantasy.

And crucially, the film does not depict her as an object. YouTuber Broey Deschanel put it well on letterboxd. The sex scenes look at Bella the same way she looks at sex, frankly, almost sexlessly.

There's a clinical quality to them. They're not staged for arousal, they're staged for curiosity.

And Emma Stone herself, as a producer, as the person who was actually there, said she felt complete agency. She said the scenes were vital to showing Bella's freedom. And that matters. That's not nothing. Does that resolve every tension in the film? Hell, no.

The world Bella moves through is still built by men. Her freedom still unfolds inside systems created by men.

The film asks quietly but persistently, can you ever fully escape a system you were created inside of? I don't think it answers that. I think it asks it and sits with it. And for me, that is Enough Is Poor Things feminist and what kind?

The novel was written by a man. The film was directed by a man. The screenplay was adapted by a man. Can a feminist story be told by men? Is this film feminist at all?

I think it is stubbornly, imperfectly, interestingly feminist. And here's my case. Bella's entire arc is about autonomy. Not in an abstract girl boss way, in a specific, bodily, philosophical way.

She owns her body completely. She decides who touches it and when and why. She makes every major decision in this film, including decisions that horrify everyone around her.

And the film never punishes her for those choices. It doesn't kill her for her sexuality. It doesn't humiliate her. It lets her win.

It lets her be a doctor in a garden with her friends while her abuser trots around as a goat. Every male character is flawed in ways that illuminate something real about how men relate to women.

Godwin created her, loved her, but also built her in ignorance of her own origins. He meant well, but he withheld her history from her. Duncan wanted her to be innocent and pliable and fell apart when she outgrew him.

Blessington wanted to surgically remove her capacity for pleasure.

And Max, who is arguably the most sympathetic of them all, still needed to be told explicitly that her body belonged to her before he could sit comfortably with her autonomy. Final Girl Digital made a point that stuck with me.

The frontal lobe doesn't fully develop until you're 25, and there's a persistent cultural tendency to prefer women who are younger, less formed, more malleable. She compares Bella's plight to the lobotomies women historically received, adding that it's like men are at war with our frontal lobes.

The Born Sexy Yesterday trope makes that preference literal. Poor things makes it grotesque. It takes the male fantasy of the innocent, sexy woman and goes, okay, here she is. Look what you do with her.

Look who she becomes when nobody can stop her. And what she becomes is a doctor, a socialist, a woman who names her own utopia and fills it with people she chose, not the people who chose her.

YouTuber Julian DeMaderos makes a fascinating Freudian point about the film. When a figure of authority says, I know what you need, there are three possible responses. Neurosis, psychosis, or what Freud called a pervert.

Someone who says, I know better than you what I need. Bella is absolutely the third option.

Every time someone tells her what she needs, she nods, considers it, digests it on her own terms, and then does exactly what she wanted to do. Her brash Description of Duncan's saltiness at a dinner table full of shocked aristocrats, Duncan's magnificent spiral into self pity.

I've become exactly what I've hated, a cloying succubus of a lover. The film uses absurdity to show how absurd the real world already is. That's satire doing its best work.

Let's talk about the deeper layer, waking up as myth. All right, I want to take a detour for a few minutes.

Not away from what we've been talking about, actually deeper into it, but from a different angle. Because there's a reading of this film that I keep circling back to, one that doesn't replace the feminist reading, but sits underneath it.

And it's this Poor Things is a myth about a soul waking up. And the shape of that myth is very, very old.

There's a tradition called Gnosticism, ancient, mystical, a little heterodox with an idea at its center that I think maps onto this film in a way that is hard to unsee once you see it. The core Gnostic idea is that the world was not made by a perfect God.

It was made by a lesser figure, a craftsman, a flawed creator called the Demiurge and the divine spark. The soul is trapped inside that imperfect creation, inside matter, inside a body, in a world built by someone who couldn't quite get it right.

And the whole spiritual journey, the whole point of being alive, is the soul waking up to what it actually is and finding its way out of the container. Now, look at Godwin. He is literally named God. He built Bella. He loves her genuinely, I think, but he built her in ignorance of her own history.

He kept her inside a house designed to contain her and controlled her access to the world. He is not malevolent. He is limited. He is a craftsman who made something extraordinary and then just couldn't quite let it go.

In the Gnostic framework, that is a demiurge, not a villain, just a creator whose love is also a cage. And the whole film is the soul's journey out of the house the demiurge built. What's interesting is Bella doesn't escape by rejecting Godwin.

She forgives him, she loves him. She holds his hand when he's dying. The journey out of the container is not a rejection of the creator, it's an outgrowing.

She gets bigger than the world he made for her. That's a Gnostic move. And here's where Jung enters. Carl Jung, because I can't talk about this without Jung.

He took Gnostic tradition seriously as a Map of the psyche. Not literally, but as a language for what happens when a person becomes fully themselves. He called the process individuation.

The thing about individuation is that it requires going toward the dark, not away from it. You don't individuate by staying safe. You do it by integrating everything.

The shadow, the uncomfortable, the ugly parts of the experience that nobody wants to claim. The madam at the brothel basically hands Bella a Jungian instruction manual.

Again, you must experience degradation and horror and sadness to become whole. Once on the other side, you will be grateful. Keep going. And again Bella goes, yes, I want that. Give me that. She is not running from the shadow.

She is walking towards it on purpose.

And every time she does the Alexandria deck, the brothel, the anatomy classes, the confrontation with Blessington, something in her integrates, something clicks into place. She becomes more herself. The other piece is knowledge. In Gnostic thought, the thing that saves the soul isn't faith or obedience. It's gnosis.

Direct, experiential, knowing, not being told, not reading about actually touching the thing and having it change you. And that is exactly how Bella learns. She doesn't read about poverty and feel sad. She sees it from a deck and it shatters her and she acts.

She doesn't read about her own origins and have a neat emotional response. She looks at the scar on the back of her neck and something reorganizes.

Every turning point in her journey is Gnosis, direct contact with reality, the world pressing itself into her. The black and white to color shift fits here too. The early world, Godwin's world, the contained world. The house is desaturated, cold and clinical.

Artificial color arrives when Bella leaves the container and starts accumulating direct experience. The world gets more real as she wakes up inside it.

That's not just visual style, that's the film telling you something about what kind of knowledge actually matters. I'm not saying Lanthimos designed a Gnostic text. I don't think he did.

But the myth is there because it is one of the oldest stories we know how to tell.

The soul waking up inside a world it didn't choose, built by someone with limits, escaping not through rejection, but through accumulation, through knowing, through refusing to stay asleep. Bella just happens to do it wearing knickers as outerwear in a Victorian fever dream, with a goat in the garden at the end.

All right, let's talk about the book and why the ending changes everything. All right.

I have to spend some time on the book because it adds a layer that the film doesn't include and it genuinely changes how you think about the whole thing. Credit here to the YouTube channel asunnybooknook for this breakdown. The Alastair Gray novel has multiple narrators.

There's the editor who found the original text. There's McCandles, who wrote the manuscript about Bella.

And then at the very end, there's a letter from Bella herself, now going by Victoria, which she says is the only true account. In her letter, Victoria calls McCandle's manuscript a beautiful lie.

She says she is not the great beauty he describes, but a plain and sensible woman. She says she was a suffragette and a driven professional while he frittered his life away not working.

She lists all the literary works that influenced his telling. Alice through the Looking Glass, Pygmalion, Frankenstein, Edgar Allan Poe. She says he invented a world where he was equal to her and Godwin.

She says it is a bastardization of her life. The only reason she doesn't destroy it is because it is meant so much to him. She refers to Godwin as the only man she ever loved.

And her great disappointment in life is that Godwin would not let her seduce him.

And then the book's final paragraph notes that when Victoria died, her brain was 66 and her body was 92, which is seemingly evidence that she really did have a younger brain. So who do you believe? The man who wrote the romantic, fantastical version or the woman who calls it a beautiful lie?

The book leaves you genuinely uncertain. It invites you to choose. And that has a profoundly subversive ending.

The revelation that the entire story you just read was one man's construction of a woman's life filtered through his desire and his limitations.

You could read the whole novel as a story about a demiurge doing what demiurges do, building a world in his own image, calling it love and getting the details wrong. The film removes this entirely. We are in Bella's perspective from start to finish, with no competing account. In some ways, that's a loss.

The book's unreliable narrator is doing something brilliant. But the film's choice is also a feminist act in itself. It refuses to mediate Bella's experience through male eyes. It gives her the story directly.

It gives her the gnosis directly. It says, here is a soul waking up. No filter, no demiurge narrating it. There is also a detail from the book I wish the film had spent more time with.

Bella will never know her mother because she is her own mother. The baby brain in the dead woman's body. She is two Generations at once.

The mother who chose death and the child who never got to live, both given a second shot at the world in the same body. That is such a melancholy, strange, beautiful idea. She is not just waking up, she's waking up for two people at once. It deserved more.

All right, let's talk about the craft. Does it all actually work? Let's talk about what this film does technically, because I think it's worth being specific.

The editing by Yorgos Mavropsaritis. Excuse me. Is intentionally disorienting. Cuts happen late or leave early. The rhythm is deliberately off. You are not being guided comfortably.

You are being asked to experience the story the way Bella experiences the world, directly and without handrails. And honestly, I love that choice, even when it's jarring.

It's another version of the film, putting you in Bella's position, arriving somewhere without context, needing to find your feet. Lanthimosa's direction is totally committed.

He described his approach on set, saying, I say, why don't we just hang the lights from the ceiling and then send everybody out? He rarely shouts action. He had actors do physical theater games in rehearsals instead of reading the script.

He creates a quiet, relaxed environment and then trusts his instincts and his cast completely and his philosophy about his own work. He said, we shouldn't be taking things too seriously. We are making movies.

Which, given how serious and layered and philosophically dense Poor Things actually is, is kind of hilarious. But I also think it's genuine. There's a playfulness at the core of this film that keeps it from becoming ponderous.

Emma Stone, on the physicality she brought to the role, said she never got to know what shame is. So she is totally free, and she really does carry that freedom in her body. The way Bella moves changes as she grows.

From the jerky, uncoordinated movements of someone learning to exist in a body to the confident, deliberate physicality of a woman who owns herself completely. It is a physical performance as much as an emotional one. If you watch carefully, there's a through line in how she moves.

By the end, she has claimed her body the way someone claims a country, by learning its terrain completely. Does it all work? Mostly, yes. The episodic pacing can feel uneven. This is a film structured as chapters rather than a traditional three act story.

And some chapters feel more complete than others. The emotional distance the film maintains is deliberate, but it can feel cold.

If you came looking for warmth and connection and the central born sexy yesterday tension is real and doesn't fully resolve. But what lingers after this film is extraordinary. The imagery is genuinely burned into your brain.

Bella in her chartreuse robe on the ship's promenade against the surreal bright blue sea. The dance scene in Lisbon. I love. I love. I love. The dance scene in Lisbon where she leads and Duncan desperately tries to take over and cannot.

The garden at the end, soft and green and abundant. Everyone she chose around her. That garden. I keep coming back to that garden.

The whole film is the distance between the river she was pulled from and the garden she built, between the darkness of not yet existing and the full saturated color of a life she made by refusing to be contained. That's the journey. That is what we just watched.

This is a thinking about it days later movie specific plot beats fade, but the central questions do not. Here's where I land. Personally, and I think it matters to be honest about this, I admired poor things enormously.

It is visually intoxicating, intellectually rich and genuinely funny in ways I didn't expect. Emma Stone's performance is one of the best I've seen in years. The world Lanthimos built is unlike anything in recent cinema.

I could not stop watching it. And. And there's an and I was uncomfortable. Parts of it made me squirm. The infantilization and sexualization happening simultaneously.

Even with all the feminist readings I've given you today, even knowing it's constructed and intentional and supposedly subversive, it still got under my skin. And I think that is the correct response. The film wants you there. What I keep coming back to is this.

The film is asking what a woman would be if she had no shame, no conditioning, no accumulated weight of who she was told to be if she came into the world without the demiurge's fingerprints all over her sense of self. And its answer is curious, funny, political, hungry, unstoppable.

A doctor who shoots her abuser in the foot and turns him into a goat and reads in her garden surrounded by the people she chose. That answer thrills me.

The way it's delivered through a male gaze, through a system built by men, with all the contradictions that entails, is where I get complicated. But I think the film knows it's complicated. I think Lanthimos knows.

And I think Emma Stone, who was a producer who had agency over every scene, who described the role as a love letter to science. She knows too. The film never resolves the tension between freedom and the systems that constrain it.

It just puts Bella in the middle of it and lets you watch her wake up incrementally, stubbornly. Gloriously, without anyone's permission. And maybe that is the most honest thing it could do. All right, final verdict.

Poor Things is a genuinely extraordinary film. Is it a masterpiece? I think it might be. Is it perfect? No. Is it for everyone? Hell no. And it doesn't want to be.

It will lose viewers who need emotional warmth, who want a clear moral framework, who find the sexuality gratuitous rather than thematic. This film is not trying to please you. It is trying to provoke you.

But if you want something that pushes, that looks and sounds unlike anything else and has actual things to say, Poor Things delivers on every account. The craft is impeccable across every single department. The performances are historic.

The questions it raises stay with you long after the credits roll. I'm giving it 4.5 out of 5.

The half point I'm withholding is for the Born Sexy Yesterday question, and I don't think it fully earns its way out of everything else. Enormous enthusiasm. I give it enormous enthusiasm. Go see it. If you haven't, go see it again. If you have, watch the colors. Watch Bella's hands.

Watch the men around her fall apart one by one while she just keeps going.

Watch her wake up incrementally into the fullest version of herself, not because anyone helped her get there, but because nobody could stop her from getting there. Ask yourself, what would you be if nobody had ever told you to be ashamed? And that is a wrap on Poor Things here on Millennial Movie Mob.

Thank you so much for spending this time with me on what is, I think you'll agree, a genuinely fascinating film to pull apart. I want to hear from you. Do you think Poor Things is feminist? Does the Born Sexy Yesterday reading land for you?

Or do you think the film earns its subversion? Did the Gnostic reading resonate or does it feel like a stretch? Did the film make you uncomfortable? Did it thrill you? Did it do both at once?

Drop your thoughts in the comments. I genuinely love to have this conversation with people who've actually sat with the film.

If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend who is always down to overthink a movie. That is our whole thing here. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one. I'm Amanda Blossom and this has been Millennial Movie Mob.

Some movies stick with you, so let's stick together. See you next time.

Speaker A: 00:51:07

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