POOR THINGS | Yorgos Lanthimos: Kino des Unbehagens - Black Box im Filmmuseum Düsseldorf

POOR THINGS 

UK 2023 · 141 min · Original version with subtitles · digital DCP · FSK 16 · Dir.: Yorgos Lanthimos · Screenplay: Tony McNamara, based on a story by Alasdair Gray · Cinematography: Robbie Ryan · Starring: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, Hanna Schygulla, and others

In terms of box office receipts and awards, POOR THINGS is Yorgos Lanthimos’s most successful film to date. The film is based on the 1992 novel of the same name by Scottish author Alasdair Gray. The story, set in late-Victorian London, centers on Bella Baxter. At the beginning, she speaks very little and appears to have the motor skills of a toddler. It soon becomes clear that this is a “Frankenstein-esque” situation and that Bella has been given a second life through a complex operation performed by the mad scientist Godwin Baxter.

Starting from the developmental stage of a child, she relives the various stages of adolescence and, during her second puberty, makes a decision: She wants to go out into the world! In the process, she not only has universal human experiences and gradually broadens her personal range of emotions and ways of thinking, but also discovers her female sexuality and encounters various forms of resistance along the way. Here it becomes strikingly clear: The patriarchal social structures at the end of the 19th century resemble those of today in many respects.