The Hidden Horror of Poor Things

We are now 6 years since the explosive beginnings of #MeToo in late 2017 and early 2018. #MeToo movies began shortly after with Kitty Green’s The Assistant (2019) being among the most notable. But in the last year-plus, things have really ramped up. Since fall 2022, there’s been Tár (Field), She Said (Maria Schrader), Women Talking (Polley), Barbie (Gerwig), Priscilla (Sofia Coppola), May December (Haynes) and Poor Things (Lanthimos). And these are just the most notable ones. 

Cards on the table: I saw Poor Things and had so many problems with its central woman character that I thought she warranted a full analysis, more than you’ll get in the typically reserved reviews that come out when movies do. 

But to do this, I want to start by framing what I mean by #MeToo movie. I wrote a chapter of my dissertation about #MeToo narratives, which I defined as “stories centered on sexual abuse and a power imbalance between victim and abuser, usually an older, powerful man and a younger, less power-filled woman.”

It must be noted that Barbie only partly fits this definition as Barbie very much centers on a gendered power imbalance, but it doesn’t have anything to do with sexual abuse. Of the list above, Poor Things also only partly fits this definition as it full of sexual abuse and all about gendered power imbalance, but it isn’t a story fully “centered” on these things. In short, Poor Things is a #MeToo narrative that doesn’t want to be seen as such. 

And, to be clear, it succeeds at its goal. The early reviews have largely been rapturous with many viewers seemingly blind to the messy nature of its central elements. A lot of people have been able to see the film, enjoy it, and rarely mention consent or the male gaze in their reviews. This means at least two things: 1. The film did succeed at hiding the fact that it’s a #MeToo narrative, and 2. Our American film culture writ large appears to be okay with letting it get away with this. 

The rest of this article addresses rape, mental disability, and other things related to abuse and consent. It also features spoilers for Poor Things.

Let’s get into the gritty particulars. The film centers on Bella Baxter (Emma Stone). She used to be a Victorian woman named Victoria married to a man Alfie (Christopher Abbott). Victoria’s life in Alfie’s “care” was horrific and full of trauma, so she took her only route out and killed herself by suicide. She was pregnant at this time, and so her act also serves to prevent her child from having to grow up in the same world that traps Victoria. Victoria partly succeeds, killing herself but not the baby. The baby is still alive. And so the Dr. Frankenstein-like Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) is able to use the baby’s brain to reanimate the body of Victoria who he now calls Bella. 

Some of these details are revealed later, but most of this information is given to audiences right at the beginning. This tactic serves an exact purpose as the exposition dump forces audiences to try and follow along rather than critically think through each piece of information they just received. 

We start with the woman Victoria, currently unnamed, who, while pregnant, flees her abusive home and takes the only route available to her as a means of escape, death by suicide. This is cliché, tragic, and common for Victorian heroines. In her essay “Pure Heroines” (found in the collection Trick Mirror, 2019) Jia Tolentino does an extensive survey of how literature treats girlhood as opposed to adult womanhood. She notes that for countless characters like Anna Karenina (Anna Karenina, Tolstoy) and Edna Pontellier (The Awakening, Kate Chopin), suicide is the means of escape from constricting social circles. 

It’s worth noting that this action of Victoria—taking her own life to spare her child—is the peak moment of agency afforded either Victoria or Bella. And it happens before the action of the story. Everything after this is without her informed consent starting with her reanimation. She explicitly desires to be dead and is made re-alive against her will. Worse than this, her re-aliving comes via the brain of her unborn child. This is a horrifying idea that ought to chill to the bones like a concept in the “White Christmas” or “Black Museum” episodes of Black Mirror. Poor Things doesn’t want you to feel this way. It wants you to ignore the horror and move on. 

And so we have Bella, an adult woman with the brain of a (her own) child. Baxter’s assistant refers to her as “r*****ed.” Though this language is more or less period accurate, it’s unnecessary to the film, and it says something about how far we haven’t come as a culture that the people behind the movie thought this was okay, and that such a line was still able to be played off as a joke. It’s also very inaccurate. Bella is not mentally disabled; she just has the brain of a (her own) child. It’s ridiculous that Baxter think her act any other way, and it’s ridiculous and problematic of the film to make Bella’s immaturity the joke. It’s cruel, and it shows the film is just as guilty of mistreating Bella as the men that exist within in it. Baxter put a child’s brain in a woman’s body, and then both he AND THE FILM act like Bella is somehow deficient. She isn’t. She isn’t even mentally disabled. She just literally has the brain of a (her own) child. 

Before we get into consent, I want to pause here to say that I think this premise creates a lot of incredibly fascinating possibilities. But Poor Things plays all this off as comedy, and that’s the problem. By fixing the (completely undeserved) joke on Bella, the film forestalls examination of the horror present here. The idea of the mind of a child forcibly inserted into its mother’s body could be the whole film. Put that idea in the hands of Nia DaCosta or Jordan Peele and we might have something. Similarly, the set-up of this movie, like nearly all Frankenstein stories, is really queer. Here you have a child’s mind forced to live in a foreign body, a body controlled by men and defined almost exclusively by sexuality. Give this idea to Lana Wachowski or especially Jane Schoenbrun, and it’s ripe to be one of the greatest trans allegories put to film. 

This should be a film about motherhood, as Victoria flees from it and Bella experiences a strange version of it constantly. This should be a film about queer existence, as mind is untethered from body. And it definitely should be a feminist film as the whole thing centers around male power and lacking female autonomy. 

But it’s not. And here we must address sex, lack of consent, and the male-gaze. There’s a lot of sex in this movie. This sex is usually played as comedy given euphemistic phrases like “furious jumping.” To borrow a line from Arrested Development, “the mere fact you call it that tells me you’re not ready.” And Bella isn’t! She’s a child, and a child can’t consent. Under the parameters of the film, all the sex Bella has with men is nonconsensual. It’s very reminiscent of Wonder Woman 1984 (Jenkins, 2020) except with that film, everyone was quick to call it out and say, “hey, there’s no informed consent going on here.” And yet with Poor Things, this backlash hasn’t been there or certainly hasn’t been as pronounced. 

This is bad, but it gets worse. Because not only is there a lot of nonconsensual sex going on, this supposed sexual liberation is the main means by which Bella “develops” as a character. To the extent that she does develop (and this is debatable), she does so through sexual self-actualization. But there’s no consent! And because of this, there’s no agency! There is no intimacy in Bella’s sexual encounters, which would be fine except that the film advances the male fantasy that Bella likes sex. This sex isn’t built around communication or pleasure. There’s no foreplay and even a few lines about how Bella wishes there would be. The film even suggests that the men in the film are not good at satisfying women. And yet the film advances the male fantasy of its characters—that Bella is somehow an enthusiastic participant in their liaisons.

This is really what it boils down to: rather than critiquing or unsettling dynamics of male power, Poor Things perpetuates the ideas it ought to critique. Bella lacks agency or autonomy but props up male fantasies centered on sex and subservience. Rather than shining light on how horrible the society is that gives women no option beside death by suicide, Poor Things dismisses Victoria’s trauma, reanimates her for our vicarious enjoyment, and does so without the slightest note of irony. 

It laughs at Bella and encourages us to do the same. 

It reduces her to fleshy bits to enjoy and encourages us to do the same. 

It ignores the horrifying implications of its premise and demands we do the same.  

I’ll close with this. When the Golden Globe nominations came out, people were up in arms about May December being listed as a comedy. How could this drama explicitly about grooming be considered a comedy? There was validity to the outrage. But I must ask: why wasn’t there outrage about Poor Things being called a comedy? It has the same sort of sexual power imbalance, and both films are built on characters that have experienced significant trauma. The difference is May December makes a sly critique that, at times, verges toward satire. Poor Things just hopes you ignore the problem and hope it goes away. And many viewers have and will continue to do so. This is the insidious trap of Poor Things making it all the more imperative that we call it out.