Emma Stone is Bella Baxter. When we first meet her, we see a grown woman behaving like a wobbly two-year-old, joyfully smashing plates and peeing on the floor. She is confined in a Victorian house outside of London with Godwin Baxter, a brilliant scientist and surgeon with a face like Frankenstein's monster, played by Willem DaFoe. 

Bella calls Godwin “God” for short. Her vocabulary is delightful and fantastical, a combination of innocent childlike babbling mixed with worldly and scientific terms she's picked up from conversations with God.

Also wandering around the house are an assortment of Dr. Baxter's experimental hybrid pets like a chicken with a pig's head and a goose with the head of a dog. Mrs. Prim (Vicki Pepperdine) is the housekeeper who cleans up the messes and assists Dr. Baxter with his experiments.

Like a toddler, Bella throws tantrums as she learns how to speak and marvels at how her body moves. Her hair grows at an astonishing rate. The longer her hair grows, the more developed her mind and body become. One day, sitting alone at the dining room table, she has a spectacular orgasm with an apple, gasping, "Bella discover happy when she want!"

Bella loves sex and wants more of it. She also wants to get out of the house and travel to places she has only seen on maps. Dr. Baxter schemes to keep her trapped at home by marrying her to the temperate McCandles, who has fallen in love with her.

Enter Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a sleazy lawyer who thinks he's God's gift to women, hired to write the marriage contract. When Wedderburn reads the restrictive language, he searches the house for the woman being entrapped. He tells Bella he will show her the world, and she eagerly agrees.

Off they trot to have wild and erotic adventures in kaleidoscope versions of Lisbon, Alexandria, and Paris as Bella evolves into a self-created woman who lives on her own terms.

Poor Things is so marvelous that it renews my hope in both humanity and Hollywood. It is a movie that you must see in the theater. I hope it wins the Golden Lion so I can see it again.

Read some of the reviews to whet your appetite as you wait for the film to be released by Searchlight Pictures on December 8, 2023 in the US and January 12, 2024 in the UK:

Euro News

Poor Things is so damn good, it’s hard to know where to start the praise... Every set, prop, costume, and cuter versions of The Island of Dr. Moreau’s hybrid creatures are something to behold in this brilliantly nuts voyage of self-discovery.... Thematically layered, raunchy, marvellously executed and above all fun, Poor Things is a triumph.

The Guardian
Emma Stone has a sexual adventure in Yorgos Lanthimos’s virtuoso comic epic

And Poor Things, adapted from Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, is something else again: opulent and optimistic, Poor Things suggests, in its own perverse way, that most human beings have the capacity to change for the better, and that a world of kindness would be achievable if every individual pitched in to the best of their ability.

Variety

Brilliantly taking on Alasdair Gray's comic novel with 'The Favourite' writer Tony McNamara, Lanthimos serves up a macabre sensory banquet miles from his former Greek weird-wave asceticism, but just as subversive.

Entertainment Weekly

Ciao from the Venice Film Festival,
Cat Bauer

Venetian Cat - The Venice Blog