Poor Things

Adapted by Tony McNamara from the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, the film follows Bella Baxter, a young woman reanimated by the surgeon Godwin Baxter. She begins with an infant's mind in an adult body, then matures fast, leaving his house for a European tour that teaches her pleasure, money and ideas.

Critics praised the saturated, fish-eye production design and the score, and singled out Emma Stone, who plays Bella's rapid growth from halting movement to full self-possession. Reviewers disagreed over the sexual politics: some read the many sex scenes as a story of a woman claiming her own body, others as a male director's fantasy staged for the camera.

For a clinician, the film literalises development, compressing infancy, adolescence and adulthood into a single body and making the formation of a self visible on screen. It presents desire as something Bella comes to own rather than suppress, and follows her movement from a figure shaped by men who want to keep her toward a woman who sets her own terms.