I don't know, ya'll. Even 1933's "Baby Face," with Barbara Stanwyck eagerly and unapologetically fucking her way to the top, still feels pretty bold for 2024. So I can't so easily dismiss a movie in which a woman uses sex work for both carnal pleasure and existential inquiry. And not many movies would even try to make an intellectual link between personal sexual freedom and broader philosophical and sociopolitical inspection.

The problem is Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony Macnamara treat these ideas as if they were points they had to acknowledge to be taken seriously (or to win Oscars). All the effort goes into the very willful "weirdness" of the production, a weirdness shoved in your face. Fish eye and iris lenses for no good reason. The score's atonal whining. Even the phantasmagorical visions of Lisbon, London and Paris feel strangely hermetically sealed, not embodied beyond whatever's in the frame at a given moment. Eye-catching, yet ersatz.

The cast.... does not elevate this thing the way I thought it would. Two principals -- Ramy, Carmichael -- are just unprepared for this. Dafoe is Dafoe. Stone and Ruffalo work really hard, and they both made me laugh out loud more than once. But they seem almost in competition with Lanthimos's devices. Rather than live inside of his world, it feels like they're constantly auditioning for it. And Dafoe's mad scientist is let off the hook in a way that just felt lazy.

Only Christopher Abbott, coming far farrrrr too late in the game, arrives fully formed and with a sense of danger. He feels the most like a character out of a Lars von Trier movie (which “Poor Things” often evokes), an avatar for the pitiful brutalities of men.

There's plenty of spark and wit throughout (those Frankensteined animals for one). But to bring it back to "Baby Face:" if that film's movement was upward, "Poor Things" is more lateral, and it's a lonnnnng lateral movement to get to what amounts to a pretty anticlimactic ending.

(Teaneck cinemas, NJ)