Poor Things
Patrick D

Review by Patrick D

Poor Things 2023

★★★★½

Watched Dec 28, 2023

Yórgos Lánthimos’s films are dreams, each governed by its own version of non-logic, painted with its own distinct brushstrokes. Poor Things is the best dream he’s had, the most narratively engaging and the most visually impressive. Emma Stone is excellent. Her character’s transformation is a daunting task for an actor, and she nails it. Mark Ruffalo is hilarious—the funniest performance he’s ever had. The production design is somewhere between Tim Burton and James and the Giant Peach, with that surreal quality that AI-generated images have (and I don’t mean this as a dig). 

My one complaint is the sequence when the ship docks at Alexandria. Emma Stone’s Bella is shown all the dead and dying poor Egyptians down below, leading her on a momentary quest of altruism. I understand the storytelling choice to expand Bella’s worldview and push her further along in her journey, but it felt like an unnecessary cheap shot to use the one non-European locale as the site for this realization. “Look at all these nameless, faceless brown people suffering!” Maybe they could’ve docked in the Balkans, or southern Italy, to achieve the same effect. 

It’s a brief misstep in an otherwise great film, one of my favorites this year. Rollicking laughs, incredible acting, a concept executed. Go see it!

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