The book Poor Things is based on is even stranger than the film (2024)

Poor Things is a pretty odd movie. The film, now available to stream on Hulu, and up for 11 Oscars, fits the expectations for a project from Yorgos Lanthimos, the absurdist director of such curiosities as The Lobster and The Favourite. But the movie isn’t half as odd as the 1992 novel it’s based on, by eccentric Scottish writer and artist Alasdair Gray.

Lanthimos read the book and decided to adapt it as far back as 2010. “Immediately when I read the novel, I felt like I haven’t read anything like it, and especially, I was drawn to the character of Bella Baxter,” Lanthimos told Polygon in an interview in late 2023. “I just found her a fascinating character and someone that could definitely carry a film.”

Lanthimos met Gray at the time and was impressed by his energy and enthusiasm. (Gray was then in his 70s; he died in 2019.) The author dragged Lanthimos on a speed-walking tour of his native Glasgow, “showing [him] the necropolis, the cemetery, the university, parks, things around his neighborhood, and just talking about the novel and the characters,” Lanthimos recalled. Gray said he had seen Lanthimos’ film Dogtooth and thought it was great, and gave the Poor Things adaptation his blessing.

The movie Lanthimos eventually made is pretty faithful to Gray’s book. The story follows the same lines, and the extraordinary concept — a reclusive Victorian surgeon brings a dead woman back to life by transplanting the brain of her unborn child into her adult body — is straight from the book. That character, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), is just as startling, spirited, and lovable in the movie as she is on the page. The film echoes many of the book’s themes — free will, sexual liberation, escape from social norms — and screenwriter Tony McNamara finds a tone that is not so far from Gray’s in its mix of mordant humor and warmth, silliness, and seriousness.

But even though Poor Things the movie may seem like a lot, Poor Things the novel is even more. Lanthimos and McNamara made some big changes in their adaptation. Here are some of the ways the book is different.

Poor Things, book vs. movie

Image: Searchlight Pictures

Like most of Gray’s books, Poor Things is deeply Scottish. Although Bella goes on a globe-trotting adventure, the book opens and closes in Glasgow, where her creator, Godwin “God” Baxter, lives, eventually with his assistant, Archibald McCandless. Scottish identity, history, and politics are important themes in the book. Lanthimos jettisoned all this by moving the action to a hazily imagined London, although Godwin remains Scottish in Willem Dafoe’s portrayal.

The movie’s phantasmagorical art deco world is quite different from the world of the book, too. With its strange vehicles, architecture, and modes of dress, it feels quite disconnected from our reality. Gray’s book obviously has some outlandish elements too — it is a kind of parody of Victorian Gothic novels — but it takes place in a world, and a history, that are recognizably real.

The Willem Dafoe character

Godwin Baxter is grotesque in the movie, with his scarred face and his brown-bubble belches, but Gray’s Godwin is another level of weird. He is enormously large, with an outsized head and “conical” hands ending in daintily pointed fingers that the other characters find too disturbing to look at. They are also unsettled by his unpleasantly high-pitched, screeching voice. Lanthimos and Dafoe considerably soften this creation, although his essential kindliness and misplaced spirit of scientific inquiry remain. And since he retains his Scottishness, Dafoe’s version of Baxter works as an affecting avatar for Gray himself, the creator of this weird story.

Image: Searchlight Pictures

Politics

Gray was a lifelong socialist and Scottish nationalist who had great compassion for his characters. Lanthimos tends to avoid overt political statements and study his characters from a distance, as if they were under a microscope. One of the film’s few failures is the moment of Bella’s sociopolitical awakening, when she sees a scene of appalling poverty in Alexandria. Stone sells the moment as hard as she can, but Lanthimos averts his gaze, presenting the supposedly devastating scene as a tiny, blurry tableau at the foot of one of his grand, surreal vistas. In the book, the scene is vivid and personal, and marks the beginning of a more explicit socialist crusade for Bella.

Lanthimos told Polygon that a retreat from the book’s political content was deliberate, and aimed at making the movie more relatable and more focused on Bella’s journey as a woman. “I didn’t find that it could be as much part of the film we were making, which is following her story, that story about a woman — which is a much more universal thing,” he said. “The book is also a huge essay about a lot of political things, and especially about Scotland and its relationship with the rest of the world and so, yes, that aspect couldn’t be an equal part in the film.”

Unreliable narrators

The movie is presented mostly from Bella’s point of view, with occasional cuts back to Godwin and Max McCandles (his renamed apprentice, played by Ramy Youssef) in the London house. The book has a more complex, nested structure. Most of it is narrated by McCandless, with long letters from Bella giving updates on her world tour. But there’s also a framing device in which Gray presents himself as the editor of McCandless’ vanity autobiography; an account of a meeting with Bella, much later in her life; and a refutation of McCandless’ account by Bella herself, who says it is all a morbid invention and “positively stinks.”

In the book, it’s at least a possibility that Bella’s weird origin story is all the invention of her timid husband McCandless, which she frames as an appalling attempt to downplay her achievements and politics in order to boost his own perspective. Or maybe Gray was just making fun of his own overactive imagination and male gaze on this story of feminine empowerment. The film doesn’t have any such ambiguity — although arguably, the fantastical setting puts the whole thing in quotation marks of a different sort.

Photo: Atsushi Nishijima/Searchlight Pictures

The Margaret Qualley character

The biggest insertion made by Lanthimos and McNamara — and the one that makes the least sense — is Margaret Qualley as Felicity, a repeat of the Bella experiment by Godwin and Max. It’s unclear why they try to make a new Bella when the first one leaves — possibly they want to make improvements, or they feel deserted and lonely after Bella elopes. Felicity is good for a few sight gags, and Qualley’s timing is spot-on, but the invention of the character significantly cheapens Godwin and Max’s motivations for no real purpose, and Felicity doesn’t actually do anything significant to the story.

Poor Things’ ending, reframed

Lanthimos and McNamara choose to end their version of the story at a happy, if slightly twisted, moment for Bella. After discovering her true identity and meeting her cruel former husband, Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), Bella returns to the late Godwin’s house with a motley found family, including Felicity and Max, and takes up Godwin’s experimental surgery. The movie’s final gag is that she has swapped Blessington’s brain with a goat’s — a just revenge for his abuse of her former self, perhaps, but a cruel use of the dark art that brought her to life that doesn’t ring true for the character.

Through its extended coda and framing devices, the book presents a much more ambivalent account of the rest of Bella’s life. She and Archibald McCandless put their medical skills to better use in the book, serving the people of Glasgow with a women’s clinic and a public health initiative. But McCandless is ineffectual, and Bella’s socialist ideals are eventually thwarted by political reality. She’s last seen as an eccentric old woman whose only patients are dogs. It’s a much sadder end — but, arguably, a less bitter one. Alasdair Gray’s books are many things, but they’re never cruel.

Is Poor Things a good book?

Image: Canongate Books

Yes! It’s brilliant, funny, and even more surprising than the film — you should read it. Poor Things may be Lanthimos’ most upbeat movie to date, but the book has a natural warmth the film doesn’t, and a more complex and nuanced perspective on the (very bizarre, occasionally outrageous) material. Like all of Gray’s books, it’s boldly illustrated and painstakingly typeset by the author himself, which makes it a unique reading experience.

Poor Things is probably the best place to start exploring Alasdair Gray, but if you want to go deeper into his work, you’ll find much to reward you in his dystopian, weirdly horny, and just plain weird writing. His first novel, Lanark, a surrealist portrait of Glasgow, took him 30 years to write and may be his masterpiece. If Poor Things got you interested in his unique perspective on sex and sexual politics, you could give 1982, Janine a try. But some of his very best and wildest work is to be found in his short story collections. Unlikely Stories, Mostly will give you a feel for the dizzying scope of his imagination, from apocalyptic sci-fi to the court of an imagined Asian emperor. If you’re ready to commit, the massive, beautiful Every Short Story is a tome that will surprise and delight you for years to come.