PSA: Poor Things is not a true story (2024)

24January 2024

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things has, for the most part, been met with critical acclaim since its UK release earlier this month. Culture writers at The Guardian, The i, and The Evening Standard all awarded the film five stars, heaping praise on its intricate costumes, whimsical, otherworldly sets, and deft tackling of themes such as sex and autonomy. However, for all the widespread praise, a small vocal minority of viewers have denounced the film entirely.

If you’re unfamiliar, Poor Things follows Bella Baxter, a woman who is the product of an experiment conducted by Godwin Baxter (or ‘God’) in which the brain of a living infant has been transplanted inside the body of its deceased mother. We watch as Bella’s mental age gradually catches up with her physical age and she discovers all life has to offer, from org*sms and pastel del natas to poverty and patriarchy.

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It’s an interesting conceit for a story, but some viewers have taken issue with the ‘immorality’ of the film’s premise and slammed its depiction of a mentally underdeveloped woman having lots and lots of sex. “This movie was disturbing. Her brain was not developed and multiple men are assaulting someone that is cognitively a child,” reads one Reddit post. “Poor Things is disgusting. DO NOT WATCH IT. Sexualising babies shouldn’t be a matter of amusem*nt, this movie shouldn’t be legal!” says another viewer on Twitter.

It’s baffling that anyone could have watched Poor Things in such bad faith that they were so hung up on the issue of Bella’s mental age for the entire two hours and 20 minutes they took nothing else away from the film. Sure, Bella’s baby brain is a major plot point and an uncomfortable fact that underpins the majority of the film. But does art always have to be ‘comfortable’ and palatable for every viewer imaginable? Can’t we make space for directors like Lanthimos, who specialise in provocative and disturbing films? Aren’t we capable of suspending our disbelief anymore? Do the people claiming the film “sexualises babies” realise that Emma Stone is 35 and is just pretending to have a baby’s brain?

I could try to argue that it’s all OK anyway because it’s possible Bella discovers sex when her mental age is actually around 18, or something. But even this seems besides the point. Who cares if Bella’s mental age is five? None of this is actually happening.This isn’t to say that disliking the film is ‘wrong’ – just that it’s difficult to meaningfully engage with critics who refuse to think about the film critically (rather than moralistically) and throw their toys out the pram at the first sign of any difficult or squeamish concepts.

It also bears repeating that a director’s choice to depict something on screen doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily promoting or glamourising it. It seems obvious, but it’s important to note in the face of puritanical arguments like these that we’re not expected to root for pathetic, sleazy lech Duncan Wedderburn (perfectly portrayed by Mark Ruffalo). He does abduct and manipulate and exploit Bella, but doesn’t he get his comeuppance by ending the film penniless, driven mad by his own pretensions, and confined to a padded room? By contrast, the final shot sees Bella sipping a martini and reading a book surrounded by her (unconventional) family.

To me, it seemed as though the film was more about how society’s influence can shape someone’s character and stymy their spirit, and this was, in part, what all the sex scenes were about. Bella doesn’t realise that it isn’t ‘polite’ for women to masturbat* with an apple at breakfast or loudly ask geriatric women about their sex lives or have multiple sexual partners. The film encourages us to innocently ask, like Bella does: why not? How would all of us act if we reentered society without any understanding of norms or gender roles? At one point, after a particularly frenetic session of “furious jumping”, she bluntly asks Duncan: “why don’t people do this all the time?”. He can’t really answer her – and the audience are encouraged to think about how they would answer that question, too.

Of course, Poor Things is not a straightforward tale of a young woman discovering her sexual identity without incident. Bella is kidnapped by Duncan after she reveals she’s been seeing other men; she’s alarmed to discover that sex workers can’t choose the clients they sleep with (and that some men actually prefer it if the women haven’t enthusiastically consented); at one point she’s threatened with genital mutilation at gunpoint. But she’s depicted as continually clawing back her autonomy from the controlling and abusive powers in her life – or, as the tattooed brothel madame puts it, “a woman plotting her course to freedom”. In any case – why are we all so desperate to look at the film solely through a feminist lens anyway? Can’t it just be a film about a woman who happens to love sex? “For all the f*cking, there is no menstrual blood!”, quipped Angelica Jade Bastién in her critical Vulturereview. But so what?

poor things is disgusting. DO NOT WATCH IT. sexualizing babies shouldn’t be a matter of amusem*nt, this movie shouldn’t be legal!

— lucy 2.0 (@lucyeshua666) January 16, 2024

On the surface the Poor Things backlash certainly seems to affirm recent research which found that almost half of young viewers want to see less sex on screen and are oddly puritanical when it comes to their media preferences. But this isn’t a new thing – audiences have worried about the ‘morality’ of art and confused ‘depiction’ with ‘endorsem*nt’ for years.

In many ways, the Poor Things discourse is reminiscent of the backlash to Lolita, the Vladimir Nabokov novel published in 1955, which charts the abduction and abuse of teenage girl Dolores Haze (or ‘Lolita’), told from the perspective of her abuser and stepfather Humbert Humbert. In the book, Humbert Humbert waxes lyrical about murder, rape, and paedophilia, prompting Sunday Express editor John Gordon to call it “the filthiest book I have ever read” and “sheer unrestrained p*rnography”. But what overly censorious critics like Gordon missed is that the book is not a ringing endorsem*nt of abuse – it’s an exercise in demonstrating the power of words. The point Nabokov is making is that language can be weaponised by bad actors like Humbert, and has the ability to turn a subject as harrowing as paedophilia into something which seems charming and whimsical. It’s a conceit, a premise – just like the ‘baby brain’ plot point in Poor Things.

Clearly poor media literacy isn’t a ‘Gen Z’ problem, as is so often suggested. But we’d all do well to stop looking for moral ‘messages’ in films. It’s more rewarding to consider them as explorations of big societal issues; as vehicles for ‘unpacking questions’, rather than ‘providing answers’. After all, Poor Things doesn’t really draw straightforward, moralistic conclusions about female empowerment, but that’s the beauty of it. It’s got audiences thinking. Those who could bear to suspend their disbelief, anyway.