Poor Things is a conspiracy to trick you into watching star/producer Emma Stone get drilled. We’re going to talk about the artistic merits and its place in the culture, but make no mistake – director/producer Yorgos Lanthimos and Stone made this primarily as a big porno.  

London- A deformed surgeon called Godwin “God” Baxter (Willem Dafoe) has surgically transplanted a late-stage fetal brain into the body of a grown woman, a creation whom he calls Bella Baxter (Stone). Baxter almost immediately discovers masturbation and, like a child, tries to share this new joy with everyone she meets – but, like an adult, this is taken as a sexual advance. She quickly agrees to marry Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), whom God hired to study her around the clock, but just as quickly runs off to Lisbon with depraved lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo).

The plot is ripe for real-life readings about sex addiction and pedophilia, or more specifically the ethics of taking advantage of someone with a mature body but an unsound mind, but this isn’t what the film is interested in. Baxter’s consent is enthusiastic but uninformed, but it’d be more accurate to describe her behavior as ignorant and care-free than addictive – we don’t see anything like the lying, withdrawals or shirking of responsibilities you’d see from an addict. That’s partially because she’s a child and doesn’t have any responsibilities. The men who have sex with her are all predators, but it is how they prey, not the fact that they prey, that separates them in the film’s world.

What the film is interested in is showing full penetration. All of it. Baxter’s time in Lisbon with Wedderburn isn’t about metaphors, it’s about watching your precious little girl get railed mercilessly in every imaginable position on every available surface by the absolute scum of the Earth, and she’s loving every second of it. However protective you feel about Bella Baxter you have to feel that while watching her giant, child-like eyes roll back as sex hormones flood her young, transplanted brain that can’t possibly be ready for them.

For Stone, who might have been a sex symbol if her films were advertised based on her beauty instead of her talent, it’s a statement as much as it is a joke. Stone has framed Poor Things as primarily a story about men becoming more threatened by a woman as she becomes more powerful, and it could recall her star-making role in Easy A in that sense. She waited to do nudity until a shocking-yet-tasteful scene in Lanthimos’ last film, The Favourite, and in Poor Things, her body is a banner, having sex and dancing with whomever she wants whenever she wants, first in complete ignorance and then in complete disdain of the norms she’s violating. When Baxter’s clothes are on, Stone’s performance of learning to pilot her adult body is just as joyous and fun.

The highlight performance, however, is from Ruffalo as a delightfully evil horndog. He gets about twice the screentime of McCandles and Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott). He’s the only love interest we see meeting Baxter for both the first and last time, so there’s more evolution to their relationship, but it’s also easy to see how he was this sex-obsessed loser the entire time.

In 2024, the screen is famously starving for sex, and simply showing this amount of sex is a bold statement. It’s one thing to simply imply that Baxter is having sex – and she apparently has even more encounters offscreen – but to actually see her getting pounded this often, to have the film commit a large amount of runtime to this part of her life, asserts that this is how important her sexuality is to her. Plenty of films about main characters who need to get laid follow the funny little things that happen to them while trying to get laid, then cut away when they succeed. Poor Things reverses this dynamic and shows the catharsis of actually getting laid, then follows through with its character growing through the other side of the experience.

Also shown, and much more interesting, is the space in which all this happens – the backgrounds of Poor Things are where we can see Baxter maturing. Production designers Shona Heath and James Price build out marvelous, colorful and very small worlds for each location meant to be how they look from Baxter’s perspective. It’s incredibly expressionistic. The end credits play against Wes Anderson-esque flat shots of the sets, so you can tell how proud the production is for building these things.

When she isn’t busy getting drilled, Baxter is the center of a simple absurdist satire, pointing out injustice wherever she sees it and asking plainly why systems are the way they are, mostly in the context of romantic relationships, but she soon begins asking why the poor don’t simply seize the means of production – the film wears its politics on its sleeve in a way that’s ugly, even if you agree.

Poor Things has frequently been compared to Barbie, and it’s easy to see why. Both films explore the massive psychological impact the mere image of a woman can have, whether it be a doll made to be a neutral representation of femininity or a blank-slate brain in a fully grown body. Both lead characters navigate the bizarre behavior that their image inspires while becoming not-so-neutral themselves. In Barbie’s case, she literally becomes a real woman, while Baxter’s brain matures and she grows from toddler to adult.

Screenwriter Tony McNamara, both through plot and Baxter’s care-free dialogue, ensures that the men of Poor Things appear to be operating purely on their own instinctive reactions to Bella, and it’s clear based on those reactions that they see her as a body, not as a full person. God sees her as parts to be reassembled according to his own whims. McCandles, Wedderburn and Blessington are all aware of, or have every chance to be aware of, what Baxter is, and they all confusedly default to treating her the way they think a woman ought to be treated – McCandles tries to marry her, Wedderburn tries to fuck her and Blessington tries to enslave her.

Barbie is also a great contrast to Poor Things – Barbie is directed by a woman and portrays a queer and feminine fantasy of identifying the patriarchy and turning toxic masculinity, the Kens’ insecurities and distrust of each other, against itself. Poor Things is a masculine and mostly straight fantasy in which the heroine takes power by turning male desire, what might be perfectly healthy desire if it weren’t so predatory, against itself. The films have extremely different ideas about what problems their heroines face and what they can or should do to solve them.

Poor Things is grand and brash and funny, equal parts crowd-pleaser and dramatic artistic statement that makes it a terrific and safe choice for the Golden Lion and Golden Globe it’s already collected, but it can’t help but be disappointing coming from Lanthimos, who approached many of these same gender and power dynamics more interestingly, and arguably more stylishly, in The Lobster and The Favourite.

Leopold Knopp is a UNT graduate. If you liked this post, you can donate to Reel Entropy here. Like Reel Entropy on Facebook and reach out to me at reelentropy@gmail.com.