As a sort of female Frankenstein monster, American actress Emma Stone shows off her skills in a new film. The 34-year-old stars in Giorgos Lanthimos’ eccentric fairy tale Poor Things, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Friday night. At her side, the American Willem Dafoe (68) embodies a quirky scientist. Because of the Hollywood strike, neither came to Venice.
Oscar winner Stone plays a pregnant woman who kills herself while escaping abuse from her husband. The scientist Baxter (Dafoe) finds her corpse, inserts the brain of her unborn child and revives her. She is now called Bella and has the mental age of a child, but is still developing.
The audience follows Bella as she learns to move and speak. Eventually she escapes from the confines of Baxter’s house and gets to know life on her travels. Her environment is both irritated and fascinated by her unprejudiced and sexually liberal manner.
Lanthimos (“The Favorite”, “The Killing Of A Sacred Deer”) finds his own imagery in “Poor Things”, which is based on a novel by Alasdair Gray. The sets and costumes look like a Victorian surrealistic wonderland. Some scenes are black and white, some in color. The optics are partly distorted, for example by a fisheye lens.
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