A gynocentric take on the Frankenstein story, director Yorgos Lanthimos’s satirical new screen spectacle, Poor Things, features a jaw-dropping portrayal of a child-woman like no other. Initially a food-spitting, plate-smashing, carpet-wetting toddler in Emma Stone’s hardly childish body, Bella Baxter must quickly adjust her intellect and verbal skills to match her accelerating libido. An overreaching Scottish surgeon (Willem Dafoe, with a fissured Elephant Man face) adopted and named Bella after resurrecting her—a pregnant-suicide case—and equipping her with a new consciousness. The immature lass has just become engaged to Baxter’s apprentice (Ramy Youssef) when the lisping cad Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) seduces her. Under the surface of its voluptuous fusion of Victorian Gothic, steampunk, Art Deco, and Orientalist décor—the dazzling, kaleidoscopic images mirroring Bella’s emotional education—Poor Things is a feminist fable. The attempt by every man to control Bella, and by Wedderburn to possess her, founders on the purity of mind and spirit that, as she begins to understand and manage her drives, makes her genuinely heroic. —Graham Fuller