How does director Yorgos Lanthimos follow absurdist masterpiece The Favourite? With something even crazier, of course. Get ready, if you can, for POOR THINGS

WORDS HAYLEY CAMPBELL

Things are about to get weird.

You know that when you sit down to watch a new Yorgos Lanthimos film. The surreal family nightmare of Dogtooth (2009) was followed by The Lobster (2015), an absurdist pitch-black comedy that changed dating, and lobsters, forever. 2017’s The Killing Of A Sacred Deer was a psychological revenge story starring international-marker-of-unsettling-weirdness Barry Keoghan eating spaghetti, and Colin Farrell facing an impossible choice. And then came The Favourite (2018), with Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz as two points of a cut-throat manipulation triangle, each vying for the attention — and bed — of Olivia Colman’s sickly Queen Anne, her 17 rabbit children nearby.

Each of these films is completely Lanthimos — dark, funny, playful — and his new one, Poor Things, is all of those things, too. But when you take your seat, know this: Lanthimos’ work has never been weirder, or grander.

For this — his riskiest, most expensive, most philosophical film yet — Lanthimos has reteamed with Tony McNamara, screenwriter of The Favourite, and with Emma Stone, who stars as Bella Baxter: a living experiment by the deformed, eccentric scientist Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe, under four hours of prosthetics), whom she calls God. Baxter has shelved his innovative work of creating duck/bulldog chimaeras to bring the body of a dead woman back to life.

When we meet Bella, in a segment filmed like a black-and-white 1930s Universal horror movie, she is a grown woman with the brain of an infant, smashing plates purely because she delights in the smashing of them. But she is maturing at hyperspeed. Her hair grows inches in mere weeks; within months, her clumsy totter on the unwieldy legs of a toddler learning to walk becomes a bold dance in the colourful bars of Lisbon. Her speech develops from baby babble into academic argument. It’s a Frankenstein coming-of-age story, a skewering of societal norms through the eyes of Bella encountering them without prior knowledge and conditioning. It’s about identity, memory, the pursuit of freedom, and — though her origins are in death — it’s about a full-hearted love of life and discovery. Together, Lanthimos, Stone and McNamara have built a world and a woman unlike anything we have ever seen.