Catching up with Poor Things. The land that ethics committees forgot.

Far far away, in a steampunk version of 1895, there was a land without ethics committees. In this world, “Bella” was “born”.

We see much of this vivid and terrifying world though a fish eye lens, which makes us feel like we are deep sea divers exploring a world in which we could not possibly survive without protective filters.

Dr Frankenstein/Moreau/”God” is played by Willem Defoe beneath layers of prosthetic disfigurements designed to somehow create features that are even more scary than Willem Defoe’s actual face. We learn that his scarrings are the result of repeated horrific experiments conducted on him by his own father, a father whom he is unwilling to resent. “God” creates Bella by inserting the brain of the unborn child of a suicide victim into the mother’s still viable body.

This is, in many ways, a very cold film about prosecuting the logic of an empirical bent fearlessly and without social scruple. Of course, the amorality of ruthless empiricism is itself a kind of morality – of a very rigid nature. Bella is an experiment performed by an experiment. These wheels within wheels eventually lead the viewer to worry about the extent to which Emma Stone is being experimented on by Yorgos Lanthimos.

Hers is a magnificent performance. She progresses from monolingual toddler to eccentric adult in front of our eyes. Her Bella is a sex addict on Benthamite principles. Who would not seek to acquire as much intense pleasure as possible in this life? To deny oneself any source of gratification is a logical absurdity. Yet even more than sex, she is driven by curiosity.

There were times, particularly in those scenes she shares with Ramy Youssef, when I was reminded of Doctor Who and Leela. 

Mark Ruffalo’s English accent is so strange, so strangulated, so uncomfortable, that it takes on a distinctive steampunk grandeur all of its own. Dafoe’s Scottish accent is all that is left of Alisdair Gray’s original context. Ruffalo’s Wedderburn demonstrates the stupidity of a particular version of libertinage. Bella is to be “liberated” on his terms, and his is utterly destroyed when her liberation is charted on her own terms.

Whatever else this film is about, it is about extreme bodily estrangement. There is no room for organic materialism in this severely Cartesian universe in which pineal glands (and the brains that wrap them) can be exchanged easily from body to body.

Perhaps inevitably, I found myself thinking of Peter Greenaway while watching Poor Things. The strange, jarring formalism of approach is there, as is the painterly obsession flesh and fabric and the determination to gaze at bodies in states of dismemberment and decay. Oddly enough I think Peter Greenaway’s Poor Things would have either been rather shorter or much much longer. The scenes in the Parisian brothel would probably have been extended beyond the tolerance of most viewers and the tediousness of the same repeated scenes probably would have been extended to the point of surreal fascination.