Emma Stone’s Oscar-worthy Poor Things is the most original, daring and demented movie in years

The brilliant and bizarre comedy-drama Poor Things is like nothing you have ever seen before and might well win Emma Stone another Best Actress Oscar

Emma Stone in Poor Things. Photo Courtesy of Searchight Pictures.© 2023 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

Poor Things (MA15+)

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite)

Starring: Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo

Rating: *****

A rich education, learned hard and fast

Poor Things is, without doubt, the most daring, demented, arresting, amusing and downright original creation to have lit up a screen this year.

The movie is radically different from anything you may have seen before. So much so that we find ourselves in uncharted cinematic territory here, for the first time in a long time.

And yet, despite that surreal veneer of strangeness, Poor Things is never less than an accessible and endearing experience.

Leading the way is a fearless Emma Stone, in a spectacular performance that already has her on a fast-track to the next Best Actress Oscar.

The best I can tell you of what you may encounter from time spent with Poor Things is to imagine a clever, bawdy, and rather unhinged mash-up of My Fair Lady and Frankenstein.

Stone plays the role of Bella, a young woman who has seemingly met with a tragic end in a Victorian-era London unlike any other captured on screen before.

Enter Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a disfigured, but distinctly intelligent surgeon who clearly graduated from the School of Movie Mad Scientists with first-class honours.

Employing procedures not found in any medical textbook, Baxter stumbles upon a way to bring the recently deceased Bella back to life.

There is, however, a catch. As there always must be when you’re in the business of reanimating the de-animated.

Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo in the brilliant and bonkers Poor Things.

If she is to properly claim and embrace her new life, Bella will need to literally acquire a mind of her own.

Dr Baxter’s operation has left Bella with the IQ of a baby. She must first learn every last nuance of what it takes to be a human being all over again.

The comic nature of Bella’s crash course in living opens a rich vein of universal humour which Stone masterfully mines throughout Poor Things.

Even when Bella inevitably discovers the world of sex – and some of the disreputable souls that populate that world (watch out for a brilliant Mark Ruffalo as a devious European playboy) – the movie never loses its capacity to elicit hearty and genuine laughter at every turn.

Poor Things should not be judged merely as a darkly sly comedy, however.

There are telling aspects to Bella’s accelerated odyssey of self-discovery and education that will resonate powerfully with women everywhere (particularly those who picked up on signals transmitted by another screen character on a parallel trajectory who went by the name of Barbie).

Poor Things screens in advance previews from December 22 and opens in general in general release on Boxing Day

WISH (PG)

***

General release

West Side Story’s Ariana DeBose provides the voice of Asha in Disney’s Wish.

“Always nice, but not always necessary” is a vibe always wafting around the output of Disney’s animated features division these days. While Wish won’t snap the legendary studio (celebrating its centenary this year) out of this pleasant little rut, it contains just enough moments of irresistible uplift to stay on your good side throughout. West Side Story’s Ariana DeBose supplies some lively and engaging voice work to the role of Asha, a regulation Disney teen heroine rebelling against an evil king (Chris Pine) who has stolen all the unfulfilled wishes of his subjects. Asha wishes on a star while sending a distress signal that all is not well in her homeland. That star descends from the heavens to investigate, and then put things right. While this isn’t the most essential big-screen cartoon you’ll ever see, there is plenty of good stuff happening on a regular basis. Particularly whenever the multi-talented DeBose gets to sing, or Pine gets to indulge in some kooky villainy.

COUP DE CHANCE (M)

****

Selected cinemas from Friday

Woody Allen is back to his best in the French-language thriller, Coup De Chance.

Just when it looked like it was all over for the veteran American filmmaker Woody Allen, the one-time comedy genius has reversed a downward spiral and come up with one last, very good movie. Most surprisingly, that movie is not a comedy at all. Instead, it is a pleasingly devious domestic thriller, not a world away from the kind of fare Hitchcock was attracted to in his Hollywood prime. Oh, and there is an additional surprise: the movie is performed entirely in French. The plot is disarmingly simple. The perfect marriage of the perfect Paris couple (played by Lou de Laage and Melvil Poupard) comes apart at the seams due to a chance encounter. The wife bumps into an old friend from high school (Niels Schneider). The husband is initially too preoccupied to realise his wife might be about to start seeing someone else. Then he gets an inkling adultery might be in play, swiftly followed by irrefutable evidence. How the husband elects to act upon this information – and what consequences this may hold for his sweet-natured spouse – are matters handled expertly by Allen in a truly gripping final act.