Poor Things, a late 2023 film starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe won a few Academy Awards last year in 2024. While the cinematography was great and the acting, especially by Stone, was incredibly compelling, I lean towards this movie being reviewed as worse than previous critics have reviewed it as.
The film was rated at 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, 88% on Metacritic and a 7.8/10 on IMDb. While those are great reviews, I found the film to be uncomfortable, controversial, and flat-out weird. It wasn’t just the half-human, half-animals, or even the scenery that could have passed for an adaptation of a Dr. Seuss book, this movie was strange and off-putting.
What I didn’t like about the movie:
The intense sexual content including many graphic sex scenes, nudity showing both male and female genitalia, and strong, coarse sexual language is definitely not suitable for teenagers and younger. However, even as a mature adult I found myself disgusted by a lot of the movie as sex was a prevalent theme throughout the two hours and 21 minutes of the film.
With Stone being used as the major sex symbol throughout the movie and having a sexual awakening, the amount of sex scenes shown throughout felt almost pornographic in nature. This movie was so controversial that the UK banned one of these scenes for being too graphic.
With the plot of this movie being an homage to Frankenstein with a severe sexual twist, I found this movie to be barely watchable. Reanimating a dead woman’s body that died of suicide and replacing her brain with her unborn child’s is an already extreme premise, but when you add all the sex scenes given the fact that Stone’s character is emotionally immature but physically mature, it makes the plot of this movie feel very uncomfortable.
It felt that this was exploitative in nature to even show these scenes given the context of the film being that you are putting an unborn child’s brain in a grown woman’s body, and the fact that the director was male just makes it worse in my opinion.
However, this film was not without its redeemable qualities.
What I liked about the movie:
This movie did win Academy Awards for many reasons that I agree with. The acting was phenomenal, resulting in an Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Stone.
Her portrayal of someone with a gowing child’s brain in a 25-year-old’s body was flawless and the character growth certainly was evident by the end of the movie.
The costumes and cinematography won Academy Awards of their own and perfectly encapsulated the context of the film.
In addition, the antagonists of the story, those that used and deceived Stone’s character, get their comeuppance and I liked the twist at the end.
Overall:
Now I’m not saying the movie was terrible or that others will feel the same way I did about this movie. To each their own. But Poor Things definitely is not for everybody and it certainly was not for me.
