Poor Things (2023). Courtesy Searchlight Pictures.
Bella Baxter enters a dance floor as though nobody has explained the rules. Her arms shoot out, her steps break away from the couples around her, and Duncan Wedderburn struggles to turn the occasion into something he can manage. In Poor Things, movement is one of the first ways Bella claims a space that other people have already organised for her.
Yorgos Lanthimos's 2023 adaptation of Alasdair Gray's novel follows a woman revived by the scientist Godwin Baxter. Emma Stone plays Bella as someone learning rapidly inside an adult body. Her words, balance and coordination change as the story moves beyond Baxter's house. Stone makes the act of learning physically noticeable, without requiring Bella to explain each new discovery to the audience.
In a January 2024 Sight and Sound interview, Lanthimos described planning distinct stages in Bella's walking and speaking with Stone, then leaving room for her instincts. He had suggested films including The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and The Firemen's Ball. The preparation gave the performance a progression, even when Bella's immediate response to a room feels unpredictable.
Duncan, played by Mark Ruffalo, initially enjoys the novelty of her company. He becomes less comfortable when curiosity produces opinions he cannot direct. Books, strangers and places outside his itinerary compete for her attention. Ruffalo lets the self-assured traveller become petulant as Bella's vocabulary and interests grow. The change exposes how much of his affection depends on remaining the more knowledgeable person.
Lanthimos told Sight and Sound that people in Bella's life try to shape or possess her because they do not know how to respond to her unconventional behaviour. That pressure gives her journey more than a sequence of pleasures to discover. Encounters with poverty and inequality also interrupt the freedom she has been enjoying. Learning about the world means noticing arrangements that benefit her and harm other people.
The film's exaggerated cities and costumes keep the social rules visible as inventions. Bella can ask a blunt question in a room where everyone else has agreed to be polite, or move in a way nobody has taught her to find embarrassing. Stone's performance lets confidence arrive unevenly, through experience. Bella does not emerge with every answer. She becomes increasingly unwilling to let somebody else's comfort determine the next question.
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