Poor Things
Overview
Bella Baxter has the body of a grown woman and the mind of a toddler, and she is having the time of her life. In a fantastical Victorian London, Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) - a brilliant, disfigured surgeon Bella calls 'God' - brought her back to life by transplanting the brain of an unborn baby into the skull of its dead mother. Now Bella is learning everything at terrifying speed: walking, talking, and then, with total uninhibited curiosity, the world beyond God's house. God plans to marry her off to his kind, patient student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), but Bella runs off instead with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a flamboyant, narcissistic lawyer who promises her adventure. What follows is a grand, deranged tour of Europe as Bella discovers sex, philosophy, poverty and cruelty - working in a Paris brothel, seeing violence and death up close, and concluding that the beautiful world she imagined is a great deal uglier and more interesting than that. Emma Stone is fearless in the role, physically rebuilding Bella's walk and speech as her mind races ahead of everyone around her, and Ruffalo is hysterical as the preening Duncan, who cannot stand being outgrown. Shot in candy colors through warped lenses, it's a bizarre, beautiful fairy tale about a woman inventing herself from scratch.
