Yorgos Lanthimos is a blunt and studied filmmaker who takes the craft seriously, using what he learned from watching filmmakers such as Buñuel, Suzuki, and Peter Greenway to create his own signature style. Lanthimos’s pictures can be tales of crushingly grim dysfunction (“Dogtooth” and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”) or darkly seriocomic romps that focus on the profane cruelty of their characters (“The Lobster” and “The Favourite”). With each new project, the gloriously distinctive director continues to be one of the few modern filmmakers who desires to treat the process as high art. Guided by screenwriter Tony McNamara’s adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things” finds the director with his most artistically successful film to date. This is a ribald and spicy work; the director’s ravenous zeal for the craft evident in every frame. 

Emma Stone is nothing short of excellent as Bella Baxter, a young woman who has been brought back to life, Frankenstein-style, by Dr. Goodwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe, brilliantly mixing mad doctor with father figure kindness), whom Bella addresses as “God”. Lanthimos and Stone have unabashed fun with the creation of the character, but Bella isn’t a mere goof, as she comes to represent something much deeper. Bella speaks with a fractured syntax. Walking with the unsure footing of a one year old and flailing her arms around like a doll with loose joints, her motor skills are still developing. The character has learned important terminology and speaks with a frank directness, yet cannot understand the simplest of things; spitting out food she doesn’t like and not knowing what a banana is. Bella’s strange appearance (inside and out) makes her a monster to outside society; the very world from which Baxter shields her. 

Stone is terrific in the role, navigating Bella’s strange mannerisms in a kabuki-like performance of movement and precise diction. From her first moments, Bella is a being that exists on pure impulse. This is a bizarre creature born of scientific experimentation whose transformation into something more human is done with an audacious absurdity. Stone’s performance embraces a soul that wants to breathe in the world around her. As Bella becomes more complex and learns an enviable resilience, Emma Stone turns the work into something quite magical. There are moments where the performance becomes a descendant of Giulietta Masina’s work in Fellini’s “Nights of Cabiria” while burning with the fearlessness of Gena Rowlands’ work for her husband John Cassavetes. As Bella, Emma Stone is that good. 

“God” Baxter’s house is a strangely beautiful home that resembles some kind of well-kept gothic medical museum where strange animal experiments roam the grounds. Ducks with dog’s bodies and other creatures pass in and out of frame as they are the only “playmates” Bella has, until Baxter enlists one of his medical students, Max (Ramy Yousssef), to observe and keep record of her accelerating development. As she discovers her body and awakens an unquenchable sexual appetite, it begins to make Bella more humanistic, flipping the meaning of who will be considered a poor thing. 

In this strange Victorian setting (a blend of Mary Shelley and D.H. Lawrence), Bella’s need for sexual exploration and fulfillment makes her even more the outsider. Using apples to masturbate while at the dinner table is only the beginning of the lengths she will go to in pursuit of the feelings sex provides her. Bella’s growth becomes a sarcastic irony. As the character becomes more human, her passion for carnal knowledge would be perceived as monstrous in the eyes of male-dominated “polite society”. 

Max begins to see Bella as a real person, eventually falling in love with her and asking for her hand in marriage. A monkey-wrench in Bella and Max’s planned nuptials arrives in the form of the comically mischievous Duncan Wedderburn (an absolutely hilarious Mark Ruffalo). Duncan is a rich and manipulative cad who seeks to use Bella for sex while controlling and abusing her. Knowing she is already engaged, Duncan swoops Bella off to a voyage that takes them to London, Lisbon, and eventually Paris, a city where Bella will find her sexual place in the world. As he soon finds it impossible to assert a Svengali-like hold over this woman, “Poor Things” finds a very funny (and almost Monty Python-esque) humor. Watching Ruffalo go from conceited scoundrel to a sniveling puddle of pathetic jealousy and submission is comic gold. 

While in Paris, Bella begins to work for Swiney (Kathryn Hunter, who played the three witches in Joel Coen’s “Macbeth”). The madame of a brothel, Swiney reveals herself a predator who is hot for Bella, biting Bella’s earlobes when the desire gets to be too much, returning to her controlling position. During her time with Duncan, and now in the brothel, Bella’s awakening (both sexual and intellectual) explodes. In some of the film’s most interesting moments, on a cruise ship, Bella meets two free-thinkers of high society played by Jarrod Carmichael and the great Hanna Schygulla. Their conversations with Bella open her eyes and mind to the essence of humanity and the cruelties of the real world. These scenes are extremely well written and performed; McNamara’s screenplay speaks to the dubious kindness and blatant hypocrisy towards one’s fellow man. 

Bella’s self-education will shock some viewers. The sexuality and occasional eroticism is meant to make people feel uncomfortable. These moments are indeed graphic and those who only know Emma Stone through her comedies and Oscar-winning turn in “La La Land” may be taken aback, but Lanthimos isn’t diabolical nor gratuitous. Bella exists as a woman who learns to take control of her sexuality and Stone throws herself into the role without fear. Demanding and dominant, Bella is the queen of her carnal castle. If audiences become uncomfortable seeing a woman owning her desires, perhaps this is the director’s point. Why are so many (men and women) threatened by a woman’s embracing of her libidinous needs? Shades of Richard Brooks’ “Looking For Mister Goodbar” and, to a certain extent, Paul Mazursky’s “An Unmarried Woman” can be found in this film’s psychology. 

“Poor Things” is completely intoxicating in its visual design. Every inch of every frame is inventively rendered by Robbie Ryan’s breathtaking cinematography. Using askew angles, fish-eye lenses, and the occasional foray into black-and-white, Ryan and Lanthimos create strange and beautiful psychedelic imagery. Combined with Shona Heath and James Price’s production design, this is a unique world of bold colors and oblique architecture that would have Terry Gilliam bowing to its splendor. 

Flowing beneath all of the surreal sex and humor is a warmth that makes this film unique. Lanthimos finds tenderness in Bella’s journey. As she learns compassion and feeling, the picture finds something potent to say about human kindness and makeshift families. By the final act, a moving aura of affection shines through the madness, even in the freakishly comical last shot. 

With its twisted coloring of human nature and wildly absurdist look at society and sex, “Poor Things” is a delicious cinematic gumbo filled with everything that makes Lanthimos’s work so unique.

Poor Things

Written by Tony McNamara (based on the novel by Alasdair Gray)

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

Starring Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo, Ramy Youssef

R, 141 Minutes, Film4/Searchlight Pictures/Element Pictures