Yorgos Lanthimos directs Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe in this steampunk sci-fi sex satire where a mad scientist puts a baby’s brain in their dead mother’s corpse then she discovers fucking and the cruel realities of the world.

If The Favourite was Lanthimos’ Barry Lyndon, then Poor Things is his Clockwork Orange. Frankenstein by way of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Recreating big fake sets and baroque mise-en-scene of Neo-Expressionistic masters like Gilliam or Lynch. A sex romp that takes place in an unreality that feels historically accurate. Is it feminist? Is it socialist? Does the movie based on a nationalist author’s novel really celebrate any “isms”? All I know it is bawdy and silly and brutally cutting. Sex and humanity are carved a new one. Emma Stone gives her finest comedy performance, worthy of Peter Sellers. Her creation feels pregnant with complexity and import. Squish. Squish. Squish. Ruffalo’s cad and Kathryn Hunter’s amused brothel Madame are also award worthy. Prestige cinema with nudity, gore, hybrid beasts, SFX, short skirts, peephole bras, dead genitals, unnecessary surgery, gastric bubbles, cynical men, poverty, various male cages and fairy tale twists and turns.

9

Perfect Double Bill: The Favourite (2018)

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