Emma Stone gave Poor Things an unexpected happy ending, says director Yorgos Lanthimos
It’s been a year of arresting lead performances in movies, perhaps none more so than Emma Stone’s in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things. The movie is a lot: a surreal, ornately designed, provocative fantasia set in an alternate Victorian Europe. It features, among other memorable characters, a mad scientist who belches up murky bubbles and stitches hybrid animals together, and it deals with themes of sexual liberation, socialism, gender constructs, and free will. Its huge, practical sets are crammed with details, captured by woozy fish-eye-lens cinematography.
And yet Stone, playing reanimated corpse Bella Baxter, easily dominates all this noise. She is perhaps the most original and charismatic lead character in any movie from 2023: a young woman who starts under the care of mad scientist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) and with the apparent mental age of a toddler. She develops rapidly over the course of the film, fuelled by an insatiable hunger for experience. And by the end of the film, she has a fierce, principled intelligence.
Putting her performance together was a technical challenge for Stone, Lanthimos, and screenwriter Tony McNamara, the smart, acerbic Australian writer of Hulu’s series The Great, who previously collaborated with Stone on Cruella, and both Stone and Lanthimos on The Favourite.
“Usually, you have a movie and the character talks the same way for the whole movie,” McNamara said on a video call with Lanthimos and Polygon. He’s talking about Bella’s disarming turns of phrase, like calling sex “furious jumping,” and a man she has tired of (the caddish Duncan Wedderburn, a hilarious Mark Ruffalo) as a “swearing, weepy person.” “It’s not often you get a chance to create a language that’s evolving scene to
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