Last December, I would have said that the most daring film of 2023 was SALTBURN. My view changed, however, when I watched POOR THINGS last week. Director Yorgos Lanthimos (THE FAVOURITE; THE LOBSTER) already has a reputation for making “out there” films but with POOR THINGS, he has truly outdone himself.

Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe, THE FRENCH DISPATCH), a surgeon in a quasi-futuristic Victorian-era London, has a penchant for making chimera out of various domesticated animals. Bella Baxter (Emma Stone, CRUELLA; LA LA LAND) is his latest work, created from the reanimated body of a dead woman and the brain of the foetus that was growing inside of her. Bella’s brain is maturing at a fast rate and, as it does, she develops an insatiable thirst for learning about the world around her. One of her early discoveries is sexual self-gratification but she has no filter to temper her curiosity of it in public. That’s where Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) comes in. The medical student is hired by Dr. Baxter to be the Igor to his Dr. Frankenstein. In the months that follow, McCandles watches over Bella, documenting her every whim and action. He eventually falls in love with her and Dr. Baxter encourages his young protégé to marry her. Before the wedding day, Baxter engages the services of lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, THOR: RAGNAROK; SPOTLIGHT) to draw up a prenup of sorts but Wedderburn proves to be an unscrupulous cad and he whisks Bella off on a whirlwind adventure around the Mediterranean where she discovers the joys of “furious jumping”.

When the lights came up in the cinema after the final credits rolled, I turned to my colleagues and said just one word to them — “Wow”. Now there are good wows and there are bad wows, and we had seen plenty of bad wows in recent weeks as the distributors here clean out their catalogues for the crop of new films that are coming soon. This was a wow that said, “That was an incredibly ambitious movie with performances that went way beyond almost everything else we had seen in the past year.” There’s a very good reason why POOR THINGS has received 11 Oscar nominations and Emma Stone is a real contender to win her second Leading Actress award. Her performance is akin to Nik Wallenda walking across Niagara Falls on a tightrope without a net. (Google it, kids.) Stone, like Bella, is absolutely fearless, which speaks volumes about the trust the actress has in the director. This project could have gone horribly pear-shaped in the wrong hands but with Lanthimos at the helm it soars to stratospheric heights.

As fabulous as Stone is here, Dafoe and Ruffalo are equally brilliant. (When is Dafoe not brilliant though?) This is unquestionably Ruffalo’s best performance to date and it’s not surprising that he received an Oscar nomination too. Huge credit has to go to screenwriter Tony McNamara (THE FAVOURITE; CRUELLA), who has also received an Oscar nod, for taking Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, “Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Office”, and breathing life into such interesting and, often times, quite unintentionally humorous, characters.

But my biggest praise goes to Lanthimos for his unique vision. Every scene is a work of art (both the production design and the costumes are spectacular), which the director makes full use of, often shooting through fish-eye lenses that add to the story’s outlandishness. In any other year, he’d be the favourite to win the Oscar for Best Direction but this is probably going to be Christopher Nolan’s year. Between POOR THINGS and his previous work, he’s certainly deserving of every honour he receives.

POOR THINGS opens in Hong Kong on Thursday (February 29th). Had I watched it in 2023, it would have been my second favourite film of the year. It’s five stars all the way.

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