Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		5.0
Audio		5.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

Poor Things Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 6, 2024

There's weird, and then there's Yorgos Lanthimos weird. While The Favourite for all its eccentricities may have convinced those following Lanthimos' cinematic career that he was tamping things down a bit in favor of more generally commercial and "accessible" offerings, Poor Things returns to more of the downright gonzo qualities that helped to define both The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. As I mentioned in reviews of both of those last named films, there was an undeniable "WTF" quotient to them, and that situation is most definitely in (full) force with regard to Poor Things, though in this case the film's dazzling production design may be enough to distract those who might otherwise not care much for this kind of quasi-feminist reworking of certain tropes from the Frankenstein canon. In this case, the "good" (?) doctor is named Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), and he's a horribly disfigured, scarred elder whose physical injuries turn out to have been caused by his own surgeon father, who used his son as an experimental guinea pig. The Baxter family is evidently quite interested in experimenting on humans, so when a pregnant suicide victim washes up to be claimed by Baxter, he performs a Caesarian on the corpse, and then transplants the unborn baby's brain into the (dead) mother's skull, ultimately reanimating her to be a veritable "woman child" (as opposed to a man child) named Bella (Emma Stone).

Lanthimos has one of the most audacious visual senses of any contemporary film director, and his stylistic flourishes are on full display from the get go, with an arresting opening that documents the suicide of the poor woman (who is later identified as a well to do woman named Victoria Blessington) in full, dazzling color, which then segues to black and white (a choice that then recurs interstitially) as some background information on the newly rechristened Bella is imparted. In Baxter's surgery, he performs autopsies for a gaggle of medical students, and the film soon more or less appoints one of those young men, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), as Baxter's new assistant, tasked with documenting Bella's progression as her infant brain learns to catch up to her fully adult body. Of course, romantic entanglements between Max and Bella ensue, though the film takes a rather long, circuitous route before anything approaching "happily ever after" is attained.

When Baxter suggests to Max that Max might want to marry Bella, Max readily agrees, though there are some bizarre requirements Baxter lays out for the union, which require the services of attorney Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). Wedderburn is understandably intrigued by what kind of woman would require a contract keeping her more or less a prisoner (Baxter doesn't want her leaving his estate), with the result being that Wedderburn invites Bella to join him in exploring the big, wide world "out there". In the meantime, Bella's rapidly evolving brain has "discovered" sex, which plays into Wedderburn's lustful plans perfectly, and in fact after Baxter kind of unexpectedly allows Bella to leave with Wedderburn, there are extended comical interludes devoted to the new couple's "furious jumping" (as Bella terms intercourse).

Comical if also kind of horrifying sex later comes into the story when a destitute Bella ends up as a "working girl" in a local brothel, after already having "destroyed" Wedderburn, at least in Wedderburn's own words about the subject. That certainly doesn't keep him from hanging around, even after he's announced he's leaving. In the meantime, Baxter and McCandles have done another brain transplant experiment with another young woman, but Baxter's impending mortality leads them to finally contacting Bella, who returns to the veritable fold for a family reunion of sorts. By that point, she's pieced enough clues together to get an idea of her own "origin story", which is confirmed by Baxter. Just when all seems poised for an unlikely happy ending with Bella and Max's nuptials, a man named Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott) announces himself as the husband of that aforementioned Victoria Blessington and shows up to claim Bella/Victoria as his own.

That leads to a somewhat chaotic late development that hints at Grand Guignol while also seeming to have been inartfully edited, and which once again posits Bella as a prisoner of a controlling male. Events quickly spin out of control, with Alfie arranging for yet more "experimentation" on Bella, only to have a showdown end with Alfie literally shot in the foot. Seemingly out of nowhere, since Bella has already been shown to be trapped in Alfie's mansion, Max is there to help save the day, which may suggest some late tinkering in structure that is just one of several unexplained appearances and disappearances scattered throughout the story.

This somewhat haphazard ambience continues through a whirlwind conclusion which sees Bella unsurprisingly claiming her own identity. In a way Bella's story might be compared to that of Candide , in that both tales involve a naïf thrust out into the "real world", though in Poor Things' case, it's a decidedly phantasmagorical evocation of a kind of steampunk adjacent Victorian era. I for one will be absolutely shocked if Poor Things doesn't take home the Oscar for production design, and even those not necessarily completely convinced by the narrative itself will probably be consistently amazed by what's on screen.

Poor Things Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Poor Things is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of 20th Century Studios' Searchlight division and Disney / Buena Vista with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.66:1. The main making of supplement included on this disc has some interesting information about "special order" 35mm Ektachrome film that was utilized for this shoot, and the entirety of this presentation offers a really appealingly organic appearance, despite any number of tweaks done in post, some of which may be easily discernable in some of the screenshots I've uploaded to accompany this review. Repeated uses of everything from fisheye lenses to quasi-iris effects can distort the imagery (in both black and white and color), but detail levels remain remarkably consistent (one possible exception is the very corners of the frame in some of the fisheye material, where things are understandably blurred). The palette has been graded to any number of interesting hues, with some of the supposed "African" material's deep yellows among the more memorable. But there is an almost carnival like display of cotton candy colors in other moments, where pastels can predominate on some production design elements that may remind some of the great old Patrick McGoohan series The Prisoner. This was strikingly shot by Robbie Ryan (another Academy Award nomination I won't be very surprised to see this film win), and it receives really stellar support via this 1080 presentation, but it seems positively mind boggling that the powers that be aren't granting this film a 4K UHD release as of the writing of this review.

Poor Things Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Poor Things features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that provides consistent surround activity courtesy of both pretty ubiquitous ambient environmental effects as well as kind of peculiar score from the wonderfully named Jerskin Fendrix (whose real name is evidently the only slightly less wonderful Joscelin Dent-Pooley). While there are some relatively traditional underscoring choices, Fendrix also toys with snippets of tones, tweaking them to bend and swoop, giving some of the accompaniment a deliberately hallucinatory feeling that is obviously meant to echo the similarly psychedelic visuals. Once Bella gets out into the world, there are a number of scenes where background clamor is noticeable, though the entire sound design seems intentionally "artificial" in, again, the same way the visuals can be. Dialogue (which occasionally veers into French in the brothel scenes in particular) is presented cleanly and clearly. Optional subtitles in several languages are available.

Poor Things Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Possessing Beauty - The Making of Poor Things (HD; 21:12) has a number of really good interviews and some brief looks at things like the prosthetics being applied to Willem Dafoe's face.


• Deleted Things (HD; 3:16)

Additionally, a digital copy is included and packaging features a slipcover.

Poor Things Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I'm certainly aware what a critics' darling Poor Things has been, and so if I may be permitted a review-centric joke, I was kind of relieved to see my colleague Brian Orndorf had an even less positive take on the film, which you can read here. Now, don't get me wrong, I unabashedly enjoyed watching Poor Things, but it never struck me as being as hilarious as it seemed to want to be, and its allegorical ambitions vis a vis female empowerment and sexual liberation are arguably questionable, at least insofar as they're presented, something that may admittedly be distorted by how surreal so much of the imagery is. As mentioned above, I'm frankly surprised this is evidently not getting a 4K UHD release, since the visuals are so amazing, but this 1080 disc offers superior technical merits, and the main making of supplement is very enjoyable. Recommended.