Highlights
- Yorgos Lanthimos' upcoming film "Poor Things" has received significant pre-release acclaim, including winning the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival.
- Lanthimos has a unique filmmaking style that combines dark humor with tragedy and astute framing, making his films a divisive experience for viewers.
- "Poor Things" tells the story of Bella, a suicide victim who is resurrected by a deformed mad scientist and embarks on a journey of self-discovery and liberation. The film features an excellent cast, including Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe.
Of all the films headed to theaters this upcoming awards season, few have received more pre-release acclaim than Yorgos Lanthimos' dark sci-fi comedy Poor Things, based on a 1992 novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray. It premiered in early September at the Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion, the highest prize that can be awarded by the festival jury. The hype transferred into the press with almost entirely positive reviews, resulting in scores of 94 on Metacritic and 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. Everything is business as usual for Lanthimos, who has been one of cinema's most exciting voices for over a decade.
Audiences may recognize the director's name for the 2015's absurdist romantic comedy The Lobster, starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz. However, the movie that put him on the map was 2009's equally absurdist family story Dogtooth. Starring Greek actors Christos Stergioglou, Michele Valley Angeliki Papoulia, Christos Passalis, and Mary Tsoni, the film is about a secular family in which the children have never seen the world outside their fenced-in countryside compound. After that came 2011's psychological drama Alps.
A through line began to show itself within Lanthimos' filmography: he can make his audience laugh as easily as he can make them wince. Such was the case with The Lobster, 2017's psychological thriller The Killing of a Sacred Deer, 2018's period comedy The Favourite, and will likely be the same with Poor Things. Here's what fans of Lanthimos can expect from his upcoming film.
The Psychological Horror Genre, Explained
When words like cerebral, disturbing, and mind-bending surround a horror film, the viewer can assume they're in for something good.
What is Poor Things about?
After getting nominated for an Academy Award for her work in The Favourite, Emma Stone teams up with Lanthimos again to play Bella Baxter, a suicide victim who is crudely resurrected by the deformed mad scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Bella is guarded from the outside world (much like the children in Dogtooth) and yearns to explore the meaning of life. Thus, she escapes with a slimy yet slick lawyer named Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) to find liberation and happiness. Rounding out the excellent cast is Ramy Youssef (TV's Ramy), Margaret Qualley (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), Christopher Abbott (Sanctuary, also starring Qualley), and Jerrod Carmichael (On the Count of Three, also starring Abbott).
The impetus of the story resembles that of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein but with a modern feminist twist. Bella appears to have taken her life by dropping herself from a balcony, until Baxter finds her corpse and straps her to an electromagnetic device, zapping her back to life. She meets who appears to be the first man she has ever seen (other than Baxter) in Max McCandles (Youssef), feeds a couple of experimental hybrid animals, witnesses a society beyond her imagination, and eventually meets Wedderburn as she experiences a personal and sexual awakening. Tension and humor are sure to lie ahead.
When is Poor Things Coming to Theaters?
Prior to the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike, Poor Things was scheduled to be released shortly after its Venice premiere on September 8, 2023. Fox Searchlight, now called Searchlight Pictures, pushed the date back to December 8 so that the film could gain its traction at more festivals such Telluride, the New York Film Festival, the British Film Institute's London Film Festival, and others. It will be interesting to see how successful the film will be at the box office and during awards publicity without any of its actors being able to promote it, per SAG strike rules. Searchlight will be employing a platform release, starting in New York and Los Angeles on its opening week and then expanding to more cities as the year winds down with the hope that strong word-of-mouth will put audiences in seats.
Understanding Yorgos Lanthimos
For those who have not seen a film by the Greek Weird Wave auteur, it would be wise to do so before seeing Poor Things given Lanthimos' divisive, unabashed filmmaking style. His characters often speak with a deadpan tone, their tragedies are meant to be ironically funny (at times), and everything is shot with very astute framing. Another of his trademarks is his juxtaposition between humanity and animals, which he often punctuates with shocking instances of animal cruelty (an important disclaimer to those not comfortable with this theme).
Nevertheless, Lanthimos' talent has proven to be alluring as he has made multiple films with his recurring actors like Farrell, Weisz, and now Stone, with whom he has already made a third film called AND. There is no word on its potential release date, but the cast features more of his friends from Poor Things with Dafoe and Qualley as well as Joe Alwyn from The Favourite. Newcomers include Jesse Plemons (Killers of the Flower Moon), Hong Chau (Asteroid City), and Mamoudou Athie (Jurassic World: Dominion). Movie buffs can only hope that Lanthimos fans will get their first glimpse of the secretive project soon in theaters as they watch the trailers leading up to Poor Things.