Poor Things — Freedom Is a Competence

Freedom is not the first yes. It is the earned ability to write your own no.

There is a dinner in Lisbon, and there is a band, and Bella Baxter stands up and invents dancing. Not learns it. Invents it, from nothing: knees jackknifing, arms semaphoring, a body drafting its own choreography with total conviction and zero reference material. And here comes Duncan Wedderburn, her seducer, her self-appointed professor of pleasure, and I want you to watch exactly what he does. He does not stop her. He grips her. He steers. He tries to convert her invention into steps a ballroom would recognize, and the scene turns into a wrestling match wearing a waltz’s clothes: a woman writing a sentence while a man edits it in real time. Yorgos Lanthimos stages it as the biggest laugh in the picture, and the laugh has a blade in it, because every man in Poor Things is going to attempt some version of that grip. The comedy of this movie is watching each grip slip.

The premise sounds like a grim joke, and it is one, but the punchline is humanist. Godwin Baxter, a scarred Victorian surgeon Willem Dafoe plays as a walking monument to bad fathering received and paid forward, pulls a drowned woman from the water and revives her with the brain of her own unborn child. That should be pure gothic grotesquerie. Instead, over two and a half hours, it becomes the story of a self assembled from zero at ferocious speed: language, appetite, philosophy, economics, cruelty, kindness, roughly in that order. A person, built in front of you, while the movie keeps a straight face.

Emma Stone builds the progression like a course of study you can hear. Early Bella talks in blunt declaratives and walks like a marionette still learning its strings. Then every chapter recalibrates the gait, tightens the syntax, sharpens the diction from noise into aim, and the body comedy is so precise it doubles as biography. There is no transformation sequence. No montage. You simply notice, somewhere at sea, that the toddler is gone and a mind has arrived, and that the film has been showing you the assembly the entire time. That is the performance: not a before and an after, but every millimeter between them, played in order, at speed.

Lanthimos matches her construction with his own. Robbie Ryan’s fisheye lenses bulge and warp the early chapters, so the world looks like something seen through a peephole, and the peephole widens only as Bella claims what is on the other side of it. The production design hands each city its own palette and its own verbs: London a monochrome nursery, Lisbon a pastry in heat, the ship a floating purgatory, Paris a blue-gray classroom. Jerskin Fendrix scores it with instruments that wobble and lurch like a body learning to stand, the tuning finding itself mid-phrase. The editing leaves the stitching visible, hard cuts and iris shots, sutures on the film to match the sutures on the woman. None of this is decoration. The world literally rights itself as Bella learns to stand in it, and by the final chapter the frames have gone level and calm. Because she has.

Underneath all that gorgeous excess sits a political comedy with one target: ownership, in every costume it wears. Marriage as contract. Seduction as claim-staking. Science as custody. Polite society as a rulebook written by the people it flatters. Mark Ruffalo’s Duncan is the funniest demolition, a preening libertine who signs on as professor of hedonism and discovers within weeks that he is the weeping student, and Ruffalo hands over his own vanity so completely that every pratfall lands as a moral event: here is the collapse of a man whose entire self was a deed of title to women who have stopped signing. Dafoe carries the sadness, a creator who loves what he made and cannot see that keeping is not loving, at least not until the keeping fails. Ramy Youssef’s Max is the ethical control group, curiosity without entitlement, the one man in the film who asks Bella questions because he wants to hear the answers.

And then Paris, and the brothel, which is where this story was always headed. Bella turns down the shame on offer and studies the economy instead. She unionizes her sympathies. She walks out with the film’s real discovery in hand: that the third option between safety and surrender has always been competence. She stops being a thing men argue over and becomes a person who works. It is the least scandalous thing in the movie and the most radical.

Now the flaw, and it is a real one: Max himself. The kindest man in the film is also its flattest instrument. His decency is written as a resting state rather than a choice made under pressure, and because acceptance never gets dramatized with the ferocity the predators receive, the domestic calm of the ending plays a shade easier than it should. A film this rigorous about the cost of everything might have priced its one good man too. That thinness is also the only major element Lanthimos leaves unexamined. Everywhere else the excess is the rigor: every gag load-tested, the vulgarity doing philosophy’s work in its shirtsleeves.

What the film finally lands on is quieter than its reputation. Bella’s ascent does not end on a throne or a rampage. It ends in work: a garden, a textbook, a household arranged to her own specifications, with the man who grabbed hardest reassigned to a life that finally suits his appetites. The last movement plays almost serene, and the serenity is the point. Transgression was never the destination. It was the tuition. Freedom in Poor Things is not the first yes, however loudly the film enjoys its yeses. It is the earned ability to draft your own no, revise it, and live inside what you wrote. Somewhere Bella is still revising. The film trusts her with the pen, which is more than any man in it managed.