‘Poor Things’ Is a Movie About Men Failing to Control Emma Stone

Underneath all the bizarre, wacky weirdness in Poor Things, there is a simple, feminist message: no man can control Emma Stone.

Now playing in theaters, Poor Things is the latest from Greek filmmaker/certified madman Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite, The Lobster). Stone stars as a formerly dead woman resurrected by a macabre scientist, Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), who puts the brain of an infant baby in her head. He raises his experiment like his own daughter, naming her Bella.

Though Bella has the mind of a toddler, she has the body of a grown woman. Hers is an unorthodox coming-of-age story, to say the least. She’s clueless, naive, baby-like, and yet—despite long unkempt hair and bizarre fashion sense—she is very beautiful. She is played by Emma Stone, after all. Dr. Godwin’s young medical student, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), quickly falls for Bella, in spite of (or perhaps because of) her condition. He’s a sweet guy, but he clearly relishes the idea of caring for what he perceives as a very pretty, entirely helpless child.

Bella, who is maturing quickly and recently experienced her sexual awakening, has no interest in being the object of Max’s doting care. She’s visibly disappointed when Max promises not to take advantage of her. When a smarmy, handsome lawyer named Duncan (Mark Ruffalo) pays a visit, he offers her freedom. She happily accepts, and runs off with Duncan, after convincing her pseudo-father to let her leave. Though he’s disappointed, Godwin seems to understand Bella better than the other men in her life. He understands that he can no longer control her.

For a while, things between Duncan and Bella are peachy. She’s enjoying herself as a sexual being, and Duncan just so happens to be fantastic at sex. (Or so he says!) But things sour when Duncan realizes, like Max before him, that he simply cannot control Bella. She will do what she pleases, go where she pleases, and dance wildly with whom she pleases. In an attempt to tighten his chauvinistic leash, Duncan forces Bella onto a ship at sea. Surely now, trapped on this boat, she will be his to contain.

But no. Bella finds her freedom still, this time in the world of books and learning. Duncan aided in her sexual awakening, yes, but now she’s ready for her intellectual awakening. For this, she turns to two fellow passengers, Harry (Jerrod Carmichael) and Martha (Hanna Schygulla), who introduces to concepts of philosophy, debate, and morality. Duncan is incensed, of course. How dare Bella give her attention to anything that isn’t him?

“The more autonomous she becomes, the more challenged these men seem to be by it,” Stone said in a behind-the-scenes interview for Rotten Tomatoes.

That is, when it comes down to it, the thesis of the film. Bella cannot, and will not be controlled by the men in her life. That doesn’t mean she won’t forgive some of the men in her life for trying—she loves her father, despite what he’s done to her, and she makes amends with sweet Max—but she does so on the condition that they let her be her own person. Men have been trying to control women for centuries. But at the end of the day, control is not love. And that’s the lesson Bella Baxter and Poor Things hopes to teach to the world.