‘Poor Things’ Review: Emma Stone In Yorgos Lanthimos’ Glorious Paean To Freedom – Venice Film Festival
deadline.comBack in 2009, Yorgos Lanthimos led the so-called Greek Weird Wave with the Oscar-nominated Dogtooth, an unsettling exploration of a family of teenagers kept from the world by their father in a gated estate that they could never leave.
The family is rich, so they can have anything they want except the wide world and their freedom; even sex can be bought in. Lanthimos’ Poor Things, screening in competition in Venice and certainly one of the most eagerly awaited films at the festival, is packaged very differently.
A sort of period film (which period is hard to pinpoint, although more Belle Epoque than anything else) it is stuffed with extravagant costumes and sets that make Disneyland look restrained, all cut from the same spangled cloth as the royal romp The Favourite, Lanthimos’ last film.
Strip away the decoration, however, and Poor Things is actually a return to those first concerns of Dogtooth: essentially, what it is to be a human animal.
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