Poor Thing 4K 2023 2160p WEB-DL

The plot of "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley is taken as a basis. A scientist wants to create the perfect life partner and finds the body of a drowned girl, Bella Baxter, in a river. He inserts a child's brain into her head and brings her back to life, after which unforeseen problems arise.

Poor Thing 4K Review
"Poor Thing" was one of the most anticipated films of the Venice screening: the abyss of Emma Stone's eyes peered out from posters and promo shots, warning that the audience was in for a surprising and unpredictable journey to a faraway land of milky rivers and sour shores. Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos doesn't miss a beat, but has been gaining artistic power and expanding the horizons of imagination for the past 15 years. From "Fang," which resounded on the international stage at Cannes through "The Lobster" and "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" to "The Favorite," Lanthimos has been becoming a revered, recognizable, distinctive auteur and collecting awards. The director shared and multiplied the sympathy of festival juries, cinephiles, colleagues and all the curious. As if competing with no one, standing apart at the general celebration. And yet until now Lanthimos has not received the main prizes. "Poor Thing" - the picture-favorite of the show, but whatever decisions made by the jury headed by Damien Chazelle should not be doubted: the tape is destined ticket to cinematic eternity.

Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) is the bride of Frankenstein without a fiancé: a bizarre creation of the inquisitive mind and jeweled hands of surgeon Goodwin Baxter (Willem Defoe). The mansion of her father, whom she calls God (God is short for Godwin), is a world like a sandbox and a playground, where the objects of play are not only balls and dolls, but also feelings, social paradigms and laws of intimacy. A child in a woman's body, Bella gradually throws herself more and more rapidly into the invention of herself outside of any conventions. Having once discovered the mechanism of arousal and pleasure Promethea decides to leave her father's house and embark on an erotic adventure with Duncan Weddenben (Mark Rufallo) - a man pathologically unreliable and therefore so attractive. In addition to Dr. Baxter and apprentice Max (Rami Youssef), Bella leaves home and an undiscovered secret of origin: whose body gave her life?

"Poor Thing" mocks formality and wanders on the edge of the conventional, now and then going beyond the boundaries: it is quite difficult to write down the structure of the frame, listing individual techniques - as if an attempt to deliberately strangle magic with dirty hands. Nostalgic monochrome is replaced by an extravaganza of soft and lush colors, the geometry of the frame is distorted with a fisheye, the wonderfully composed space paints a cruise ship and familiar cities: Lisbon, Alexandria, Paris and again London, where Bella appeared. If you need a sign, "Poor Poor" could be called a retro-futuristic shop of magic and depravity by Yorgos Lanthimos: streetcars glide leisurely through the clouds, goseps, pig-cats and other unknown creatures walk in the garden, and time has either stopped, or on the contrary turns the minutes on the dials faster.

Alasdair Gray's novel "Poor Thing" Lanthimos and his co-writer-screenwriter Tony McNamara turned into an odyssey of sex education and character building: Bella from a doll-like creature with jagged mechanical movements gradually turns into a woman, but what annoys everyone much more - a woman thinking. From girlish spontaneity, Ms. Baxter moves on to lessons in the mastery of her body, genuinely surprised that people do not spend all their time in bed, screaming children can not be slapped, and compliments are said not for something, but just so - out of politeness. The etudes of familiarity with communicative and sexual practices are both titillatingly comic and strikingly relaxed in the simplest things, such as acrobatically eating a pashtel da nata.

Lanthimos weaves skillful and thoughtful but casual humor into the shimmering lace of a phantasmagorical performance, and sets traps of good manners and hangs chains of stereotypes in the corners. Female sexuality is a taboo topic, a conversation that is still in search of the right movie language. Lanthimos echoes Goran Stolevski in some ways with his unclouded perception and a look as if from the outside: in "You Won't Be Alone," a witch travels through other people's lives and can't accept the taboos and unwritten but accepted rules of social institutions.

Restriction of mental and bodily impulses of fearless Bella are engaged, of course, men: the awakened freedom and liberation surrounding gentlemen try to wrap in a cocoon of their ideas about behavior, education and benefactors decent for a woman. And where it is not possible to influence the temperament, it remains only to hang the stigma resentfully. Lanthimos filmed a feminist fairy tale without stuffy morals and monologues on the front stage, which pretends to be a music box with a wind-up mechanical doll - a mere trifle, laugh and disperse.

One can speculate at length about the picture's structure and supposed lightness, but no comma would have such intoxicating significance without Emma Stone's animalistic organicism. Pale skin drenched in blush, a caustic nerve of pleasure and spontaneous wildness at the dinner table, Stone exists in a dimension of her own where there is no entry without permission. The plastics, voice, blue eyes and outfits (bow to Holly Waddington) make up a whimsical gamut of femininity that knows no shyness.

From "Poor Thing" you can draw lines of kinship in almost any direction: Pinocchio, Alice in Wonderland, Terry Gilliam's dystopian fantasy, Tim Burton's romance of strange love, Voltaire's "Candide" and, of course, Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" (and, if necessary, even "Barbie"). Sometimes one wants to endow outstanding films with pictorial or literary categories, to call them paintings, poetry, and then look for iambs, choruses, and brushstrokes between the frames. "Poor Thing", uniting everything at once, becomes a true art precisely that cinematic, where semantics, subtexts and openwork monograms do not interrupt each other, but coexist in the unity of gestures and motivations, conception and execution, sensual investment and tax on timekeeping. Films of this breed are not made every year or even every decade. Many artists don't wait for roles perfectly suited to the performing figure, and audiences don't wait for movies that can simultaneously envelope you in a sweet slumber and open your eyes.