One of the most heatedly debated films of recent years (is it art or pornography? arthouse or mainstream? feminist or chauvinist?), Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things is a film of which only one thing can be said with certainty: it will not leave its viewer cold. Featuring a stunning lead performance by Oscar-winning actress Emma Stone and a striking, bizarre visual style known from the director’s other work, the film is something of a philosophical tractate in the form of an 18th-century novel of ideas on which it has been modelled (most clearly on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but also on Voltaire’s Candide), meditating on such topics as free will, emancipation, sexuality and corporeal sovereignity.
