Yorgos Lanthimos finally makes a good film!

I'd loathed every single Lanthimos film I'd seen until 2018's The Favourite where his feel-bad cinema for once evinced some mild subtlety. And now I'm semi-bowled over that he's finally directed a good film. Based on Alasdair Gray's 1992 novel, Poor Things traces the rebirth of Bella (Emma Stone, typically fantastic), a Frankenstein's monster created by Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a surgeon who has reanimated her near-dead body with a baby's brain. As Bella moves beyond mastering basic motor skills and simple sentence structures, she self-actualizes into a brilliant woman, freeing herself from Baxter and his assistant Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) and falling in and out of love with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a lumpy lawyer with whom she jetsets around the world. Much of Bella's self-actualization resides in the realm of the sexual - she eagerly becomes a prostitute and fails to see the logic in monogamy. For some viewers, this trajectory makes her a feminist icon; for others, it's the ultimate male fantasy of unbridled sexual availability. But what makes Poor Things somewhat transcend this debate is that it takes her self-actualization as a totality. From eating properly to not punching a crying baby, Bella's journey in becoming reveals the processes we all go through in fashioning a socially acceptable presenting self. And along the way, she/we can reject any of the norms to which we're supposed to adhere, e.g., she has no need to adjust her rigid dance moves if the hilariously unconventional ballroom sequence is any measure. Poor Things helps us examine the truths we hold to be self-evident and Bella's struggle with them reminds us that the self is a perpetual work in becoming.

Of course, how much of the thrill of self-fashioning on display can be laid at Lanthimos' feet is up for debate, especially since I haven't read Gray's novel. Lanthimos fans can be reassured that his misanthropic fish-eye lens remains, thus potentially making Bella yet another of his objects of contempt. Nevertheless, there's a purity of conception here that I never would have thought possible in his cinema. It's no longer impossible imagining him joining us in the human race.

Grade: a carefully hedged B+