Poor Things (2023)
Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, a woman brought back to life by a surgeon, who sets out to see the world.
Make the creature a woman, and give her the curiosity and appetite the novel’s creature never gets to act on.
You want a strange, funny, very adult film about a woman brought back to life who refuses to belong to the man who made her.
What it keeps and what it changes
Keeps: a surgeon who reanimates a body, and a creation who wants to know what she is.
Changes: nearly everything else. It adapts Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, and the creation leaves home and does not come back on anyone else’s terms.
Whose story is it?
Bella’s.
How much time does it ask?
2 hr 21 min, Yorgos Lanthimos directing; Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe co-star. Rated R.
Four Academy Awards, one of them for Emma Stone’s performance.
Where to find it
Other ways to get it: Apple TV · Find where it’s streaming — JustWatch
More Frankensteins: Frankenstein (1910) · Frankenstein (1931) · Bride of Frankenstein (1935)