Critics reviews

Gray’s novel is an excellent fit for Lanthimos’ vision as a director: his feeling for the shifting sands of sexual power dynamics, his career-long obsession with language and its odd, imprisoning qualities.

In capturing Bella’s innocence and experience, Stone gives a career-best performance... Her radical reinvention culminates in a critique of not just Victorian values (an easy target if ever there was one) but the toxic male bullshit that manages to stink up the new millennium as well.

Poor Things is bold and radically (at times uncomfortably) honest. It will satisfy fans of Lanthimos’ previous work and perhaps win over new viewers who are desperate to engage in the kind of coming-of-age stories that propel the genre forward.

A film (based on the novel by Alasdair Gray) that gives pleasure in every fantastical frame – pleasure to the eye, pleasure to the soul – this dazzling suite of dirty minded delights is set in not-quite-reality during an era of never-quite-was.

In crafting a linear adaptation, Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara give birth to the year’s most wry and rollicking comedy, filled with fascinating designs, a stellar ensemble, and much more on its mind than your average Frankenstein retread. It's a delightfully perverse work.

As with The Favourite.... Poor Things itself is an equally – and brilliantly – surprising hybrid: a feminist coming-of-age story, monster movie and bawdy, foul-mouthed sex romp that the Greek alchemist has somehow forged into a masterpiece.

It may prove too subversive and oddball for more mainstream tastes, but it’s an exquisitely made film.

[M]oviegoers with an appetite for Lanthimos’ brand of cinematic mischief can look forward to “Poor Things,” a splendidly deranged science-fiction-horror-comedy-fantasia... one of the more extraordinary performances of her [Emma Stone's] career and certainly the most audacious.

Does it live up to expectations? In short, yes, but it’s also wilder, weirder and more ambitious than its predecessor – a film which breaks boundaries and subverts our assumptions with as much joy and recklessness as its wide-eyed heroine.

The Oscar-friendly team of the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, the Australian writer Tony McNamara and the American actress Emma Stone have reunited, after their 2018 hit The Favourite, to deliver another period movie about female power and desire. This one, however, is more ambitious, more ribald, funny, anarchic, clever and poignant, and thus more meaningful.

The film is full of such moments, brought to vivid life by Stone’s energetic embrace of Bella’s persona, the universally excellent supporting performances and Lanthimos’ wild determination to surprise us, whether by using four different lenses in a scene, painting the sky red or all that sex-positive talk out of the mouth of an ostensible babe. What a glorious paean to freedom it is.

Poor Things is an exultantly raunchy and macabre gothic comedy... It’s wildly smart, deeply thought-through work, unlike anything you’ve seen in years.