Poor Things

Poor Things adapts Alasdair Gray's novel into a picaresque that treats the Bildungsroman as a genre overdue for surgery. Tony McNamara's script strips sentimentality out of the form and replaces it with appetite — for food, sex, philosophy, and revenge against inherited rules.

The film's proposition is deceptively simple: what if a woman entered adulthood without first absorbing a lifetime of gendered conditioning? The answer is anarchic, sometimes uncomfortable, and consistently funnier than expected.

Stone's physical evolution — from toddler coordination to adult fluency — is the architecture of the film. She does not cutesy the early scenes or smooth the later ones; the character is always slightly too present for the room.

It is the rare lead performance that is both a technical showpiece and a genuinely moving arc. By the final act, Bella's competence has become a form of moral authority the rest of the cast cannot match.

The production design by Heath and James Price fuses Art Nouveau, Wes Anderson symmetry, and Jules Verne engineering without settling into kitsch. The Lisbon and Paris sequences in particular feel genuinely new.

Robbie Ryan's fisheye cinematography and the switch between monochrome and color are substantive, not decorative — they map Bella's widening consciousness. Jerskin Fendrix's skittering score completes the alien-but-period effect.

Pros: A lead performance that redefines Stone's career; production design that deserves to be studied in art schools; genuinely subversive comedy.

Cons: The film's sexual frankness is deliberately provocative and will alienate some viewers; the 141-minute length pushes its patience; Lanthimos's tonal flatness is an acquired taste.