A gynocentric take on the Frankenstein story, director Yorgos Lanthimos’s satirical new screen spectacle, Poor Things, adapted by Tony McNamara from the late Alasdair Gray’s postmodern 1992 novel and winner of Venice’s Golden Lion award, 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.
“Yes, Bella starts with a toddler’s mind,” Lanthimos says when I interview him and McNamara, “but she’s evolving so radically fast that we had to be meticulous about the stages of that journey and make sure they were truthful and that she had all the agency in each discovery so she was the one driving the creation of herself. Bella was the one making the film, in a way.”
