Willem DaFoe’s video tour of his Poor Things house is full of wild details
Yorgos Lanthimos’ dark comedy Poor Things, releasing on digital platforms on Tuesday, is in the running for 11 Oscars — and while it’s up for the big ones, like Best Director and Best Motion Picture, it’s no surprise that it got nods in the design categories as well. One of 2023’s most deliriously lavish, visually over-the-top movies, Poor Things puts its female Frankenstein figure Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) in puffy sleeves bigger than her head, surrounds her with stitched-together duck-and-dog hybrid creatures, and situates her in a house that feels like a creepy design wonderland.
In an exclusive clip from a featurette on the Blu-ray and DVD release, provided to Polygon by Searchlight Pictures, Poor Things co-star Willem DaFoe walks us through that house and points out some of the weirder details. At the same time, the designers discuss their influences and intentions in assembling the place.
The neatest detail in this video is the incredibly detailed 3D flythrough graphic, which shows what kind of previsualization imaging went into building this multi-story, multi-room set. In both the tour and the flythrough, every inch of available surface is crammed with paintings, fabric bas-relief sculpting, momentos, decorations, and occult or weird-science knickknacks. Check out that two-headed fetal skeleton, or the pancreas-shaped alchemical retort that doubles as an external pancreas for DaFoe’s character, mad scientist Godwin Baxter.
The best details on the house tour are undoubtedly the anatomical ones. DaFoe points out the secret door, and Stone points out the fish-lamps and seaweed designs sewn into Bella’s walls, but the real star of the show is the ceiling composed of two intertwined earlobes, and the makeup mirror with prominent ears on it is a fun touch, too. Then there are the details meant to evoke either an operating theater (the coiled fetus sculpture wrapped in a womb and given a prominent display place in the dining room) or a mental institution (the
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