In a perverted premise adapted from Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, disfigured Frankensteinesque mad doctor Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) saves the life of an unborn child whose mother has just attempted suicide, transplanting the infant’s brain into the mother’s skull and rearing the resulting creature (Emma Stone), a “very pretty retard”, as his adopted daughter. Gradually, however, Bella Baxter shows signs of intelligence, makes progress in the English language, and masters her fully grown toddling body. Eager to explore the world outside the scientist’s mansion but forbidden by him to leave its confines, Bella is eventually obliged to rebel and go off on an erotic adventure with lecher Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) that takes her from London to Portugal, Alexandria, and Paris – all whimsically depicted in an alternate Victorian age in which Londoners say things like, “I will smash his fucking head in” and literate blacks carry on intellectual discussions. It’s unfortunate that so much time and talent went into producing such a consistently vile film padded with shocks like a goat with the head of a duck, a chicken with the head of a dog, and a dog with the head of a goose, gratuitous scenes of cadaver dissection and mutilation, the wanton killing of a frog, and the sight of Emma Stone vomiting, urinating on a floor, or being screwed by a series of physically unappealing men.

1 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Poor Things is:

[WARNING: SPOILERS]

Economically ambiguous, dignifying prostitution as sex work of liberated women of social conscience. A vampiric Parisian madam (Kathryn Hunter), however, represents the way in which the brothel system allows an element of capitalist parasitism to hold sway over the industry. Acknowledging wealth inequality between nations, Bella is initially eager to share what money she can with the poor in Alexandria and stupidly gives a box of cash to two men who mislead her into thinking they will disburse it. Later, while working as a whore, she joins a socialist group in Paris, but this thread of the story is quickly abandoned, and there is no decisive rebuke of self-described cynic Harry (Jerrod Carmichael) when, earlier in the film, he tells her, “Don’t accept the lie of religion. Socialism. Capitalism. We are a fucked species.” Diminishing the pathos evoked by the Alexandria poor are the distance from which they are seen and Harry’s remark that “they’ll quite rightfully rope us, rob us, and rape us” if they get too close.  

Anti-Christian. The strictures of a “fucking boring” “Christian nation” contribute to women’s oppression and feelings of despair. Organized religion is also depicted as hypocritical when a priest visits a brothel.

Anti-family, featuring three examples of horrible biological fathers. Godwin Baxter’s father purports to have been an even madder mad scientist and “man of unconventional mind” who experimented on his son, scarring him and even branding his genitals with a hot iron. Bella’s biological father (Christopher Abbott), meanwhile, turns out to be a possessive cad who threatens to shoot her or have her vulvae surgically removed. In one of the least necessary scenes of this wholly unnecessary film, a father (Damien Bonnard) brings his two sons to the bordello to teach them about the facts of life, instructing them to watch and take notes as he screws Bella. Additionally, pregnancy is rendered grotesque. Bella learns that her mother, the woman whose body she now inhabits, called her “the monster” while pregnant with her. In one of the Lisbon scenes, meanwhile, she hears an infant crying and announces, “I must go punch that baby,” and she has to be physically restrained to prevent her from doing so.

Misandrist. Bella chafes at men’s repeated attempts to control her thoughts or direct her affairs, and the film is essentially the story of her feminist odyssey through such liberatory experiences as whoring and interracial lesbianism as she strains against the illiberal bonds of a society that expects women to restrict their dinner conversations to remarks like “Delighted” and “How marvelous” by discussing sex in the frankest terms. “I am reading Emerson,” the precocious Bella observes in a moment of feminist profundity: “He speaks about the improvement of man. I do not know why he does not give advice to women. Perhaps he does not know any.” The fact that she has the mind of a toddler serves as a storytelling device which allows the protagonist to critique traditional gender roles with new eyes. After experiencing prostitution, for example, she is confused when her lover, Duncan, expresses outrage and disgust, telling him that “as an experiment it is good for our relationship as it gladdens my heart toward you.” She concludes as a result of her experiment that there is “something broken” in him. At the end of the film, the wiser and more worldly Bella asks her future husband, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), “Does the whoring thing challenge the desire for ownership that men have?” As a tamed and safely emasculated male feminist fellow, he replies to her satisfaction, “I find myself merely jealous of the men’s time with you rather than any moral aspersion against you. It is your body, Bella Baxter. Yours to give freely.” Poor Things concludes with her sadistic triumph of revenge against her sexist biological father, lobotomizing him and turning him into a pet.

Pedophilic. Pretensions to profundity aside, the premise of Poor Things mainly serves as a pretext for several scenes of men having sex with a toddler through the medium of an adult woman’s body, and Bella’s erotic enthusiasm – she is even shown masturbating with produce – suggests a ravenous sexuality waiting to be awakened in the very young. “Let us touch each other’s genital pieces,” she will say, for example; or, dropping her skirt to expose her bush: “Now I must lie down and you must lie down on top of me and do more furious jumping.”

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.