‘Poor Things’ expands nationwide ‘stuffed with rude delights, spry wit, radical fantasy and breathtaking design’ [Review Round-Up] (2024)

Following its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival where it picked up the Golden Lion, “Poor Things” was released in limited theaters on December 8, 2023. Now moviegoers across the country can see Yorgos Lanthimos‘ incredible tale about the fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) when the film expands nationwide on December 22.

“Poor Things” is shaping up to be one of this season’s biggest awards contenders. With a Rotten Tomatoes score of 93%, the critics consensus reads, “Wildly imaginative and exhilaratingly over the top, ‘Poor Things’ is a bizarre, brilliant tour de force for director Yorgos Lanthimos and star Emma Stone.”

SEE Robbie Ryan (‘Poor Things’ cinematographer) on working with Yorgos Lanthimos: ‘You don’t know what’s coming next’

The film has earned seven Golden Globe nominations for Best Comedy/Musical, Best Director (Lanthimos), Best Comedy/Musical Actress (Stone), Best Supporting Actor (Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo), Best Screenplay (Tony McNamara) and Best Original Score (Jerskin Fendrix). It will contend for 13 Critics’ Choice Awards including below-the-line categories like cinematography (Robbie Ryan), costume design (Holly Waddington), editing (Yorgos Mavropsaridis), hair and makeup, production design (Shona Heath, James Price and Zsusza Mihalek) and visual effects. Check out our full review round-up below to see what critics are saying.

SEE Holly Waddington (‘Poor Things’ costume designer) on mixing modern and 19th century fashion: ‘It’s a very freeing process’

David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter praises the film, stating, “Ever since breaking through internationally with ‘Dogtooth’ in 2009, Yorgos Lanthimos has been making uniquely strange films. But there’s strange, and then there’s the nonstop bonkers brilliance of ‘Poor Things,’ an audaciously extravagant adaptation of revered Scottish writer Alasdair Gray’s novel, spun out by the Greek director and his screenwriter, Tony McNamara, into a picaresque feminist Candide. Stuffed with rude delights, spry wit, radical fantasy and breathtaking design elements, the movie is a feast. And Emma Stone gorges on it in a fearless performance that traces an expansive arc most actors could only dream about.”

Donald Clarke of Irish Times notes, “What we have is a twisty variation on the Frankenstein mythos – or do we mean Bride of Frankenstein mythos? – that never lets up in its interrogation of power imbalance between the genders. It is funny, beautiful and incisive.” Concluding, “More than anything else, ‘Poor Things’ is about the politics of control. Baxter is a deeply troubled individual. Various chimera, the results of experiments, roam his elaborate house. The head of a pig on the back end of a chicken. The head of a duck on the back end of a dog. Bella refers to Godwin as ‘God’ for much of the story. But he and his assistant, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), come across more as the image-makers in Pygmalion – age-swapped Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering – than the misogynistic monsters that abound beyond the safety of the Baxterian Eden.”

SEE ‘Poor Things’ production designers Shona Heath and James Price: Director Yorgos Lanthimos ‘wanted everything’

Guy Lodge of Variety says, “It’s a vast absurdist odyssey, positively compact at a galloping 141 minutes, that takes in a groaning buffet of settings and ripe secondary characters — all played with relish by a dream ensemble that runs the gamut from Jerrod Carmichael to Kathryn Hunter to Hanna Schygulla — but rests on a single astonishing performance by Stone. Having ceded the plum part to Olivia Colman in ‘The Favourite’ while perfecting her cut-glass English accent, she’s rewarded here for her patience with what most actors would have to honestly call a never-in-a-lifetime role. Molding Bella before our eyes from infancy to adolescence to adulthood — her speech, bearing and body language all intricately evolving from one scene to the next — she tackles grand-scale physical comedy (including a hall-of-fame-level dance sequence between her and Ruffalo) with gusto, all while marking the character’s growing, sinking sense of reality with a steadily hardening gaze.”

Ryan Lattanzio of IndieWire states, “Lanthimos situates us in what looks like 19th-century Victorian London, but surrealistic subtleties that only increase in their strangeness suggest a cracked-open world out of place and time: horse-drawn carriages are literally half-horse, half-carriage, birds have shark faces, and a half-pig, half-chicken chimera walks the streets without anyone giving a passing thought. Contributing to these experimental medical anomalies is mortician and maddened scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe, grimly soothing).” Concluding, “And such adventuring includes a lot of furious jumping indeed, as on a trip to Lisbon (an eye-popping, trippy creation by production designers Shona Heath and James Price), Duncan and Bella f*** in pretty much every position imaginable. But as Bella grows keener and wiser with each day — and her raven-haired locks continue to grow at a preternatural speed — Wedderburn starts to wonder if she’s really just “the devil wrapped in an alluring body and a brain that picks people apart.”

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