Bella Baxter is new, but she’s maturing quickly. She’s maturing so quickly that she is becoming physically and mentally mature without taking the time to develop a moral center. The development of a moral imagination requires sustained effort, apparently. She’s not immoral, exactly. Immorality requires an understanding of morality – one chooses to do immoral things in opposition to the moral actions one know one ought to take. Bella is amoral. She is without morality.
Dark-comic provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things parses the difference between morality, immorality, and amorality with a butter knife recently used to spread clotted cream on a scone. He doesn’t wipe it off first. It is an indulgent, sickly morality play. In one sequence, Bella gorges herself on pasteis de nata, a Portuguese custard tart, until she vomits. It’s an apt simplification of the first half of the film – absent a moral center learned via civics, society, religion, or experience, Bella inhales pleasure and vacates displeasure. She eventually encounters Philosophy, which provides a framework for happiness and unhappiness that aligns with her unarticulated pleasure principal. Philosophy lets her open the back of the clock and see how the gears of the world turn. She gains a sense of detachment typical of philosophical preparation. This ability to see herself and others in context allows her to navigate the world without ending up in the gutter re-exposing her custard tarts to the open air.
The form of pleasure Bella most avidly seeks is sexual. Poor Things shimmies around an X rating only by showing neither the female sexual organ nor penetration during coitus. But that’s about all it doesn’t show.
Perhaps only two of the film’s many sexually explicit scenes are sensual. They are bookends. More on those in a moment. The rest are played as the broadest possible comedy with a sense of detachment like that which Bella eventually gains. It is sex as a curious, confusing, entertaining, annoying in its necessity and yet delightful in its omni-novelty, fundamental aspect of human life. There is no consideration of sexuality as a most-pleasing gift which works to bind people to one another and reinforce the bonds of community – a Christian understanding of sexuality – but Bella (and the film which tells her story) is adamantly outside the realm of Christian morality save some humorous references to a “god.”
(I think we Christians have done a poor job of articulating the bounteous good of sexuality as God intended it, instead most often choosing to use it like a bludgeon to keep people in line while simultaneously covering up abuses happening inside the cloisture. Given Christianity’s hegemony in deciding sexual ethics for the masses for the past thousand years, I don’t begrudge these filmmakers seeking a new, freer, untainted understanding of something so core to our experience as humans.)
Once Bella moves beyond sexuality as either an insatiable need or something merely transactional, it becomes sensual again. The second scene of sensuality makes perfect sense in the thematic arc of Feminism-101-as-summarized-by-a-dude-ness that typifies the film. The first scene of sensuality is much more interesting. In this moment, sexuality is a joyous discovery that frees her, in a way, from her overbearing wardens. However, and without spoiling anything, we learn something about Bella immediately before this sensual scene which provocatively challenges the audience’s experience of that scene. Knowing what we just learned, the film dares us to be “turned on” by what we then see. Brilliantly, the film invites us to be self-critical of our propensity to judge what Bella does. Regarding its primary motif – sexuality – Poor Things is at its best when it is provocative in that more subtle way. It is rarely subtle.
The film is truly at its best in other matters. The production design, costuming, and soundscape (including Jerskin Fendrix’s deliriously odd score) are a continuous delight. It’s the kind of cinematic craft Terry Gilliam and Tarsem Singh excel at. There’s a hefty dose of silent-era stagecraft at play here too, think Victor Sjöström (The Phantom Carriage) and Robert Wiene (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari). The acting is also pitch perfect almost to an actor. Once you get the “joke” the film is making about sex, you can focus on the rest of the film and love it. If the movie didn’t devote so much of its attention to Wing Stop™ Feminism, I’d devote more of this review to discussing these other terrific elements of the film.
2023 was a big year for fantasy-laced explorations of femininity, morality, and the (humorous) limits of conventional mores regarding gender roles and human sexuality. I wonder what Bella would make of Barbie and what Barbie would make of Bella. Bella loves to dance, but she’d probably feel awkward at Barbie’s backyard barbecue, at least at first. Barbie likes bright colors, but she’d be uncomfortable with Bella’s rich tart, at least at first. I think they’d become good friends eventually though. Their interests and hearts are in the same place.
Bella Baxter is new, but she’s maturing quickly. She’s maturing so quickly that she is becoming physically and mentally mature without taking the time to develop a moral center. The development of a moral imagination requires sustained effort, apparently. She’s not immoral, exactly. Immorality requires an understanding of morality – one chooses to do immoral things in opposition to the moral actions one know one ought to take. Bella is amoral. She is without morality.
Dark-comic provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things parses the difference between morality, immorality, and amorality with a butter knife recently used to spread clotted cream on a scone. He doesn’t wipe it off first. It is an indulgent, sickly morality play. In one sequence, Bella gorges herself on pasteis de nata, a Portuguese custard tart, until she vomits. It’s an apt simplification of the first half of the film – absent a moral center learned via civics, society, religion, or experience, Bella inhales pleasure and vacates displeasure. She eventually encounters Philosophy, which provides a framework for happiness and unhappiness that aligns with her unarticulated pleasure principal. Philosophy lets her open the back of the clock and see how the gears of the world turn. She gains a sense of detachment typical of philosophical preparation. This ability to see herself and others in context allows her to navigate the world without ending up in the gutter re-exposing her custard tarts to the open air.
The form of pleasure Bella most avidly seeks is sexual. Poor Things shimmies around an X rating only by showing neither the female sexual organ nor penetration during coitus. But that’s about all it doesn’t show.
Perhaps only two of the film’s many sexually explicit scenes are sensual. They are bookends. More on those in a moment. The rest are played as the broadest possible comedy with a sense of detachment like that which Bella eventually gains. It is sex as a curious, confusing, entertaining, annoying in its necessity and yet delightful in its omni-novelty, fundamental aspect of human life. There is no consideration of sexuality as a most-pleasing gift which works to bind people to one another and reinforce the bonds of community – a Christian understanding of sexuality – but Bella (and the film which tells her story) is adamantly outside the realm of Christian morality save some humorous references to a “god.”
(I think we Christians have done a poor job of articulating the bounteous good of sexuality as God intended it, instead most often choosing to use it like a bludgeon to keep people in line while simultaneously covering up abuses happening inside the cloisture. Given Christianity’s hegemony in deciding sexual ethics for the masses for the past thousand years, I don’t begrudge these filmmakers seeking a new, freer, untainted understanding of something so core to our experience as humans.)
Once Bella moves beyond sexuality as either an insatiable need or something merely transactional, it becomes sensual again. The second scene of sensuality makes perfect sense in the thematic arc of Feminism-101-as-summarized-by-a-dude-ness that typifies the film. The first scene of sensuality is much more interesting. In this moment, sexuality is a joyous discovery that frees her, in a way, from her overbearing wardens. However, and without spoiling anything, we learn something about Bella immediately before this sensual scene which provocatively challenges the audience’s experience of that scene. Knowing what we just learned, the film dares us to be “turned on” by what we then see. Brilliantly, the film invites us to be self-critical of our propensity to judge what Bella does. Regarding its primary motif – sexuality – Poor Things is at its best when it is provocative in that more subtle way. It is rarely subtle.
The film is truly at its best in other matters. The production design, costuming, and soundscape (including Jerskin Fendrix’s deliriously odd score) are a continuous delight. It’s the kind of cinematic craft Terry Gilliam and Tarsem Singh excel at. There’s a hefty dose of silent-era stagecraft at play here too, think Victor Sjöström (The Phantom Carriage) and Robert Wiene (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari). The acting is also pitch perfect almost to an actor. Once you get the “joke” the film is making about sex, you can focus on the rest of the film and love it. If the movie didn’t devote so much of its attention to Wing Stop™ Feminism, I’d devote more of this review to discussing these other terrific elements of the film.
2023 was a big year for fantasy-laced explorations of femininity, morality, and the (humorous) limits of conventional mores regarding gender roles and human sexuality. I wonder what Bella would make of Barbie and what Barbie would make of Bella. Bella loves to dance, but she’d probably feel awkward at Barbie’s backyard barbecue, at least at first. Barbie likes bright colors, but she’d be uncomfortable with Bella’s rich tart, at least at first. I think they’d become good friends eventually though. Their interests and hearts are in the same place.
Elijah Davidson is Co-Director of Brehm Film and Senior Film Critic. Subscribe to Come & See, his weekly newsletter that guides you through the greatest films ever made, and find more of his work at elijahdavidson.com.
Godzilla is scary in Godzilla Minus One, like, heart-racing, muscle-tensing scary.
