THB 419: Poor Things

aka Young Frankenstone.

If you need to try to explain this movie to someone, you might want to stop there, because as you go down the blue brick road, trying to explain this movie, you are likely to exhaust yourself… in a good way… but in a complicated way.

It is clearly a variation of Frankenstein. It is Emma Stone’s movie. And like the Mel Brooks take, it comes with a younger mindset, ultimately blossoming into a coming of age movie.

The latest from Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos is based on the 1992 novel from Glaswegian Alasdair Gray, adapted screenplay by The Great and The Favourite’s Australian screenwriter Tony McNamara.

One version of the book’s synopsis tells the broad story as such: “Inside the memoir is the story of McCandless (Ramy Youssef in the film), an acquaintance named Godwyn Bysshe Baxter (Dafoe) who takes a suicide victim (Stone)…

I’m going to stop the detail right there, because what the quote says, you know in the first minutes of the film. And the next 20 minutes or so of the movie, in which we don’t quite know and then discover Bella Baxter’s origin story is a pleasure in its mysteries.

The movie is about Bella’s singular coming of age, but with scores of ideas woven into the quilt of the film. Some things just are, like Godwyn’s experiments. Some require a long journey into their own clarity, like the story of Mark Ruffalo’s Duncan Wedderburn in Bella’s life.