Poor Creatures: Emma Stone’s Greatest Role (review)
Yórgos Lánthimos signs a bizarre tale about a woman-child in search of emancipation which owes a lot to the extraordinary performance of its lead actress
Mad scientist with a broken mouth, Doctor Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) brings a young woman (Emma Stone) back to life and implants the brain of the child she was carrying at the time of her suicide. This new being, renamed Bella, thinks, expresses and moves like a baby a few months old, but in an adult body. His progress is first monitored by a tutor, before this creature goes to quench his thirst for knowledge and explore his sexuality by following a charming lawyer (Mark Ruffalo) across continents. More libertarian than ever, Yórgos Lánthimos creates an existential and deranged fairy tale, which wonders what remains of the individual in our rigid societies. Propriety and conventions have no effect on Bella, an explorer of pleasure – it is, comfortably, the sexiest film of the year – who spends her time breaking down these invisible and abstruse barriers . Lánthimos captures his picaresque rise through always significant technical effects (the gothic-steampunk settings of an assumed Technicolor falsity; the effect fisheye giving the impression of observing Bella in a fishbowl) and assumes an uncomfortable tone, between farce and drama. Hilarious although a little repetitive, this precariously balanced quest for female emancipation owes a lot to the extraordinary and joyfully immodest performance of Emma Stone: we knew she was gifted, but we would never have believed her capable of an incarnation also big.
By Yórgos Lánthimos With Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe… Duration 2 h 21. Released January 17, 2024
