Poor Things

Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (2023) is a vibrant, phantasmagorical subversion of the Frankenstein myth that operates as a radical thought experiment in unconditioned female subjectivity. Centering on Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a woman whose adult body is inhabited by the brain of an infant following a transplant by the eccentric surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), the film tracks her rapid-fire maturation as she journeys across a steampunk Victorian world. Because Bella is literally a “blank slate,” she lacks the socially mandated “shame” that typically governs female behavior. This lack of conditioning allows her to experience the world—and specifically her own sexual pleasure—with a terrifying, joyous clarity. The film’s greatest feminist achievement is its refusal to punish Bella for her appetite; instead, it frames her insatiable curiosity for sex, food, philosophy, and social justice as the keys to her ultimate liberation.

The visual grammar of the film—characterized by fisheye lenses, dollhouse-like production design, and a shifting color palette from monochrome to hallucinogenic technicolor—reflects Bella’s expanding consciousness. As she escapes the paternalistic “God” (Godwin) to travel with the hedonistic but possessive Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), the film deconstructs the male desire to “own” or “protect” the female body. Duncan’s eventual meltdown as Bella outgrows his sexual prowess and intellectual stamina serves as a sharp satire of fragile masculine ego. Bella’s time in a Paris brothel, rather than being a narrative of victimization, is portrayed as a pivotal lesson in economic autonomy and the “mechanics” of sex. She treats her body not as a sacred vessel to be guarded, but as a site of empirical study and a tool for financial independence.

Ultimately, Poor Things is a story about the destruction of the domestic “cage.” By the time Bella returns to her starting point, she is no longer a “poor thing” or an experiment, but a fully integrated agent of her own destiny. She adopts the pursuit of medicine herself, effectively seizing the tools of the creator and turning them toward the service of her own social ideals. Her final confrontation with her past identity’s “husband”—whom she dispatches with the cool efficiency of a scientist—signifies the end of her transition from property to personhood. The film argues that a truly free woman is one who has successfully dismantled the “internalized Victorian” within her, choosing instead a life defined by uninhibited knowledge and self-regulated pleasure. It is a bold, bizarre, and brilliant masterpiece that suggests the only thing more dangerous than a woman with a brain is a woman who has forgotten how to be ashamed.