**TRIGGER AND SPOILER WARNINGS*
This article contains discussions of sex and suicide. It also contains spoilers for the movie Poor Things. If you are sensitive to these topics or have not seen the movie, I encourage you to click away.
In August of 2021, the cast of Poor Things congregated in Hungary to begin the principal photography for their movie. The film was eventually released in late 2023 to rave reviews earning a 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That being said, not all of the responses to the film have been positive. A large audience has voiced some concern for the sexualization of the protagonist played by Emma Stone.
A quick synopsis:
Poor Things follows Bella Baxter, a woman who was raised from the dead and mentally reset at the age of zero. We, the audience, watch her grow, experience a LOT of sex, learn about philosophy, and explore her power and identity. The director, Yorgos Lanthimos, is known for his incredibly odd and whimsical films. Poor things, in my opinion, is his magnum opus. He cleverly splits the film into acts based on location and demonstrating clear sections to the audience. The first location is a fictionalized London, shot in black and white. The second setting is supposed to be Portugal and is designed in a vibrant whimsical style to contrast the original dreary setting. It further puts the view in the perspective of our heroine as she is experiencing the world for the first time and sees everything more extravagantly. The third act is also vibrant, but the color starts to fade as Bella begins learning philosophy and pondering life’s big questions. This vibrancy is further contrasted with the disturbing scene of the people of Alexandria starving to death in a gruesome fashion. This event shatters Bella’s innocence, which is further cemented when we arrive in Paris. We do still see Paris in color; however, the setting is more realistic in comparison to the previous two acts. It’s here that Bella begins to explore her sexuality and even wield it as a tool that she may use to live a life of leisure. This is where the film has gotten the most criticism and is the reason most people feel uncomfortable upon first viewing the film. After receiving word that her father is terminally ill, Bella returns to London seeking answers from what is essentially her creator. She returns more sure of herself and is determined to become a doctor. She reconnects with the man she was betrothed to at the beginning of the film and is about to marry him when her original husband shows up to claim her. This final act is where I struggle most with the film. Bella goes with her former husband to discover the life she had before she killed herself. This is where she discovers her husband is an abusive piece of garbage that wants her, essentially, only for breeding. She shoots him in the foot and then does the same thing to him that was done to her, but with a goat’s brain instead.
The main critique:
The overwhelming majority of reviews for this film boil down to a great movie but too much sex. One of the major plot points in the film is Bella’s sexuality. She discovers the joy of orgasm early in the film and is largely driven by it for much of the first two acts. Even after she finds enlightenment through philosophy and science, she still explores her sexuality throughout the fourth act. These explorations become a small tension in the fifth act and the main conflict of the sixth. We as a society are prudish, and as such view sex as taboo, and having the protagonist of the film be a willing prostitute for an entire act would cause some discomfort. That being said, I feel the critique that there is too much sex in the film to be in bad faith. Lanthimos wants us to be uncomfortable and he wants to make us sit with that discomfort and stare at it. The point of the film is not to watch a woman grow under a microscope, but to retrospectively look at ourselves and see where we can grow.
With that being said, this is all just my interpretation of this gorgeous masterpiece. There are plenty of interesting interpretations and understandings of the work. The goal of art is ultimately just so, to see the perspective of one and extrapolate millions of different meanings from it. So what’s yours?