Poor Things

Victorian London. A surgeon known as God (Godwin Baxter) shows his apprentice Max McCandless the woman he has reanimated. She is Bella Baxter — a body recovered from suicide-by-jumping into the Thames while heavily pregnant. God removed the brain of the unborn child and implanted it in the mother's skull. The mother's body now lives with the daughter's developing mind. Bella has the motor skills of a toddler and the curiosity of an infant in an adult body. Max is to study her development. God plans for Max and Bella to marry. Bella, becoming sexually aware, takes up with Duncan Wedderburn, a libertine attorney. She runs away with him on a long sea voyage and adventure across Europe. Her capacity for self-direction outstrips Duncan's ability to control. She becomes a sex worker in Paris by choice, both for the income and for the data. She reads voraciously. She develops her own philosophy. She returns to London. She marries Max. She discovers her body's original husband — the violent General Alfred Blessington — and turns the tables. The film ends with Bella as the matriarch of a redesigned household, conducting medical work, having implanted Alfred's brain in a goat.

On release the film was nominated for Best Picture and won four Academy Awards including Best Actress for Emma Stone. Critical reception was largely enthusiastic. Some objections were raised regarding the depiction of sexuality, with critics divided on whether the film was feminist or exploitative.

The objections, even when sincere, tended to miss what the film was doing. It was not making a statement about contemporary sexual politics. It was constructing a thought experiment about what a particular kind of soul would look like under particular conditions. The conditions are specifically designed: the soul is in a woman's body but has never been told that being in a woman's body has the constraints it has been told to have. Lanthimos and McNamara are running the experiment. The film is the data.

The film's three central male antagonists — Duncan the libertine, Max the loyal apprentice, Alfred the violent original husband — represent three distinct patriarchal apparatuses, each of which assumes it can contain Bella. None succeed.

Duncan is the libertine patriarchy — the seduction-and-control framework in which a woman's freedom is permitted only as long as the man is the agent of it. Duncan tells Bella she is a wild creature and he is liberating her. Bella thanks him for the early sex and then exceeds him intellectually within weeks. By the time they reach Lisbon, Duncan is in emotional crisis because Bella will not behave the way his framework requires liberated women to behave. She does not return his obsession. She does not need his protection. She moves through the world as an agent. He cannot tolerate it.

Max is the husband-coded patriarchy in its sympathetic form — the kind, patient, decent man who waits for the woman to recognize that he is good for her. Bella eventually marries him, but on her terms. She tells him she will continue her sex work for as long as it interests her. She tells him she will continue her studies. She tells him she will live in her own house with her own staff. Max accepts. The film is generous to him for accepting. The acceptance is the only available position for a man who genuinely loves a woman who has not been conditioned into the role most love-structures require.

Alfred is patriarchal violence in its undisguised form. The General owns the body Bella was born into. He believes the body is his property. He attempts to kidnap her, control her, install her in his estate. Bella's response is to defeat him by his own logic — she shoots him in a duel, then implants his brain in a goat. The poetic justice is not subtle. It is also entirely consistent with the film's larger argument. The patriarchal violence becomes the goat because that is the form its consciousness, examined honestly, deserves.

Poor Things transmits a particular and rare experience: an extended cinematic glimpse of what a soul without the standard conditioning actually looks like. Most films about liberated women show liberation as the rejection of conditioning. The films stage the rejection as the central drama. Poor Things skips the rejection because Bella was never installed with the conditioning in the first place. The result is a portrait of liberation that does not feel like resistance because the structure being resisted was not present.

What the film leaves the viewer with is a glimpse of what is possible. Most of us cannot become Bella. The conditioning was installed early and the surgery to remove it was not on offer. But the film makes the conditioning visible by contrast. We see what we were trained to be by watching what an untrained woman becomes. The contrast is the gift.

Lanthimos's Poor Things is, finally, a more hopeful film than anything else in his filmography. The Lobster, Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Bugonia diagnose systems that capture the soul. Poor Things shows a soul that escaped the capture. The escape was made possible by a fortunate accident — a particular kind of brain implanted in a particular kind of body raised by a particular kind of guardian. Most souls do not get this. But the existence of one such soul is the proof of concept. The capture is not necessary. Different conditions produce different souls. The film names what the conditions would have to include. The viewer can then look at their own conditions and ask which of them are still amenable to revision.