Emma Stone's Big, Weird Oscar Contender Is a Kinky Delight

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has made a handful of very different movies over the past decade and a half, but his pet themes have a way of recurring in every one. To take a just a few examples: His breakthrough movie, 2009's Dogtooth, was a hermetic fable about a tyrannical couple who keep their three grown children trapped in a locked compound, feeding them lies about the world beyond their gates. The Lobster, from 2015, took place in an allegorical alternate reality where single adults who fail to find a romantic partner are legally compelled to be transformed into animals. The Favourite, Lanthimos' biggest international hit and the movie that won Olivia Colman a Best Actress Oscar in 2019, was a hyperstylized historical drama that played 18th-century court intrigue for the blackest of comedy. Poor Things, Lanthimos' adaptation of a 1992 novel by the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray (the screenplay is by Tony McNamara, who also co-wrote The Favourite), can be seen as the culminating expression of the filmmaker's longtime obsessions: the horror of being trapped in a closed system, the individual's often self-destructive quest to break free from said bondage, the warping effects of intergenerational trauma, and the capacity of the human body for transformation. Poor Things is a feminist recasting of the Frankenstein myth, a gorgeously designed setting for the jewel that is Emma Stone's lead performance, and not just my favorite Lanthimos movie I've seen yet but maybe the only one of his I've really liked.