From its opening images, Poor Things announces itself as a fairy tale gone wrong, stitched together from Victorian gothic, silent-era slapstick, and grotesque body horror. Yorgos Lanthimos doesn’t invite viewers into a recognizable past so much as a distorted dream of it, where social rules feel invented on the spot and morality is deliberately unstable. This heightened artificiality isn’t decorative; it’s the film’s first clue that realism has been discarded in favor of something more revealing.
The world of Poor Things functions like a storybook diorama, with exaggerated sets, warped cityscapes, and a logic that bends around the emotional experience of its protagonist, Bella Baxter. Adapted loosely from Alasdair Gray’s novel, the film strips away historical fidelity to expose the machinery beneath power, gender, and social conditioning. By making everything feel slightly “off,” Lanthimos forces the audience to question which norms are natural and which are simply inherited habits dressed up as tradition.
This grotesque fairy-tale framework also places Poor Things squarely within Lanthimos’ auteur lineage, echoing the controlled absurdity of The Favourite and the existential cruelty of The Lobster. Like those films, it presents a closed system with its own rules, then watches what happens when a character begins to outgrow them. Before Bella ever speaks about freedom or autonomy, the world around her already tells us what kind of story this will be: one where innocence, knowledge, and power are inseparable, and where self-discovery comes at a deliberately unsettling cost.
Bella Baxter as a Philosophical Experiment: Birth, Rebirth, and the Question of Self
At the center of Poor Things is Bella Baxter, less a conventional character than a living thought experiment. Her existence is the film’s most provocative device, turning questions of identity, autonomy, and consciousness into something bodily, awkward, and often darkly funny. Lanthimos and Emma Stone invite us to watch a self being built in real time, without the usual social filters that shape behavior before we’re even aware of them.
Bella’s rebirth is not framed as a miracle but as a violation that carries ethical weight. Godwin Baxter’s experiment replaces death with a grotesque workaround, resurrecting a woman by implanting her unborn child’s brain into her body. From the start, Bella’s life is defined by male intervention, scientific hubris, and ownership, complicating any easy reading of her as a blank slate.
Born Without Inheritance
Unlike most protagonists, Bella begins without memory, shame, or internalized rules. She has no inherited sense of gender roles, class etiquette, or sexual propriety, and the film treats this absence as both liberating and dangerous. Her blunt curiosity becomes a mirror that reflects how much of “normal” behavior is learned rather than innate.
This is where Poor Things brushes up against Enlightenment philosophy, particularly the idea of the tabula rasa. Bella’s development asks whether identity is something we discover within ourselves or something imposed through repetition and punishment. Lanthimos refuses to answer cleanly, showing how even freedom is shaped by who controls the environment in which learning happens.
Godwin Baxter and the Ethics of Creation
Willem Dafoe’s Godwin positions himself as a benevolent creator, but his care is inseparable from control. He educates Bella, names her, and dictates the boundaries of her world while insisting on her uniqueness. This contradiction exposes the film’s critique of paternalistic authority, especially when it cloaks domination in the language of protection.
Godwin’s scars and monstrous appearance complicate the dynamic further. He is both victim and victimizer, shaped by cruelty yet perpetuating it in subtler forms. Through him, the film suggests that systems of power often reproduce themselves, even when their architects believe they’re acting differently.
Desire, Experience, and the Formation of Self
Bella’s sexual awakening is one of the film’s most controversial elements, precisely because it refuses to moralize her curiosity. Sex is not presented as corruption or empowerment, but as experience, another data point in her accelerated education. Her relationships expose how desire is entangled with economics, exploitation, and performance long before it becomes romantic.
As Bella travels and accumulates experiences, her sense of self begins to solidify, not through purity but through contradiction. She learns pleasure alongside cruelty, agency alongside objectification. The film argues that selfhood isn’t born fully formed; it’s assembled through friction with the world.
Rebirth as an Ongoing Process
By the time Bella asserts control over her life, she is no longer the same being Godwin created. Yet the film resists the idea of a final, stable identity. Rebirth, in Poor Things, is not a single moment but a continuous negotiation between who Bella was, who she’s becoming, and who others want her to be.
This refusal of narrative closure is central to Lanthimos’ philosophy. Bella’s autonomy is real, but it’s incomplete, shaped by systems she didn’t choose and histories she can’t fully escape. In framing selfhood as something perpetually unfinished, Poor Things offers its most unsettling insight: freedom is not an endpoint, but an ongoing experiment with no guarantee of comfort.
Autonomy vs. Control: Men, Power, and the Illusion of Liberation
If Poor Things complicates freedom as an ongoing process, it becomes even more pointed when examining the men who orbit Bella and claim, in different ways, to facilitate her independence. Each presents himself as an alternative to Godwin’s paternal authority, yet all reproduce versions of control shaped by ego, desire, and entitlement. Liberation, the film suggests, is often offered on male terms first.
Godwin Baxter and Benevolent Ownership
Godwin’s authority is rooted in authorship. He quite literally creates Bella, positioning himself as her guardian, teacher, and moral compass. His care is sincere, but it is inseparable from possession; Bella exists because he allows it, grows because he permits it, and learns within boundaries he defines.
This is the most insidious form of control in the film because it frames domination as kindness. Godwin believes he is different from his father, yet he still constructs a world where Bella’s freedom must be supervised. Lanthimos exposes how easily protection becomes justification, especially when power disguises itself as love.
Duncan Wedderburn and Libertine Control
Duncan represents the opposite extreme: not restraint, but indulgence. He encourages Bella’s appetites, frames himself as her guide to pleasure, and congratulates himself on being progressive and unrestrictive. Yet his version of freedom depends on her remaining impressed, dependent, and emotionally unformed.
As Bella grows more intellectually and morally autonomous, Duncan’s enthusiasm curdles into resentment. He desires her curiosity only when it flatters him. The film makes clear that sexual liberation without equality simply replaces one cage with another, decorated differently but built from the same assumptions.
Marriage, Respectability, and Institutional Power
Later, the promise of stability and respectability offers yet another illusion of freedom. Marriage and social legitimacy are presented as safer, more mature alternatives to chaos. But these institutions demand Bella’s conformity, smoothing her strangeness into something palatable.
Here, control is no longer personal but systemic. Bella’s body, labor, and intellect are folded into social expectations that claim to value her while quietly limiting her. Lanthimos underscores how power evolves, shedding overt cruelty for bureaucratic normalcy, while remaining equally restrictive.
Choosing Autonomy Without Permission
What ultimately distinguishes Bella is not that she finds a better man, but that she stops seeking validation from any of them. Her autonomy emerges only when she rejects the idea that freedom must be granted, guided, or approved. This is where Poor Things diverges from conventional liberation narratives.
The film refuses to crown any male figure as enlightened or redeemed. Instead, it frames autonomy as something seized through awareness and refusal. Bella’s evolution becomes a critique of patriarchal structures that endlessly reinvent themselves, offering liberation while quietly tightening their grip.
Sex, Curiosity, and Consent: Why the Film’s Provocations Are the Point
If Poor Things unsettles, it is because it refuses to sanitize the process of becoming a self. Lanthimos does not treat sex as a symbolic shorthand or a narrative reward, but as a site of experimentation, misunderstanding, pleasure, and power. The film’s provocations are not meant to titillate or shock for their own sake; they are designed to force the audience into the same uneasy position Bella occupies as she learns what her body, and the world, can do.
This is a story about curiosity before morality, sensation before socialization. By foregrounding sex so bluntly, the film strips away romantic euphemism and exposes how desire is shaped, claimed, and controlled long before it is truly understood.
Sex as Exploration, Not Transgression
Bella’s sexual experiences are framed less as acts of rebellion than as acts of inquiry. She approaches sex the way she approaches language, travel, or philosophy: with enthusiasm, confusion, and a striking lack of shame. This is deeply unsettling within a cinematic tradition that expects female sexuality to be either punished or aestheticized.
Lanthimos refuses both options. Bella’s encounters are awkward, funny, mechanical, pleasurable, and sometimes disappointing, precisely because they are not yet burdened with meaning. The film insists that desire does not begin as transgression; it becomes transgressive only when society decides who is allowed to want, and how.
The Discomfort Is the Ethics
Much of the controversy surrounding Poor Things stems from the tension between Bella’s physical adulthood and her cognitive development. Lanthimos does not attempt to resolve this tension neatly, because doing so would undermine the film’s core question: who gets to decide when a woman is “ready” to own her body?
The film places the audience in an ethically unstable position, forcing viewers to confront their own assumptions about agency, consent, and maturity. Rather than offering reassurance, Lanthimos exposes how often consent is treated as a legalistic checkbox rather than an evolving, relational understanding. The discomfort is not a failure of the film’s ethics; it is their articulation.
Men Who Confuse Access with Entitlement
Across Bella’s journey, male desire repeatedly mistakes her openness for availability. Whether cloaked in paternal concern, libertine philosophy, or romantic devotion, these men interpret her curiosity as something owed to them. The film is unsparing in showing how quickly fascination turns into ownership when a woman’s autonomy grows inconvenient.
What makes these dynamics especially pointed is that none of these men see themselves as villains. They believe they are offering education, pleasure, or protection. Poor Things dismantles this self-image, revealing how easily progressive language and sexual permissiveness can coexist with deeply ingrained entitlement.
Consent as a Process, Not a Given
Rather than presenting consent as a static yes-or-no condition, the film treats it as something Bella has to learn to articulate on her own terms. Early on, her agreements are shaped by ignorance, novelty, and power imbalances she cannot yet name. As her self-awareness deepens, so does her capacity to refuse, renegotiate, and walk away.
This evolution is crucial. Bella does not arrive fully formed, nor does the film pretend that empowerment is instantaneous. Consent here is not about moral purity; it is about developing the language, confidence, and self-knowledge to assert one’s boundaries without apology.
Lanthimos, Satire, and the Body as Battleground
Within Lanthimos’ body of work, sex has often functioned as a site of social absurdity and institutional control. In Poor Things, that impulse is sharpened by empathy. The grotesque, heightened aesthetic does not distance us from Bella’s body; it foregrounds how relentlessly it is interpreted, managed, and consumed by others.
The film’s exaggerated world underscores a real truth: women’s bodies are rarely allowed to exist without narrative. They must signify innocence, liberation, corruption, or virtue. By refusing to stabilize Bella into any single meaning, Lanthimos turns her body into a battleground where competing ideologies expose themselves.
From Provocation to Self-Definition
Ultimately, the sexual explicitness of Poor Things is not about excess, but about clarity. By showing everything, the film denies the audience the comfort of abstraction. Sex is not a metaphor here; it is labor, pleasure, confusion, and power exchange all at once.
Bella’s journey is not toward sexual enlightenment, but toward authorship. The provocations matter because they chart the messy, nonlinear process of learning what one wants, what one refuses, and what one will no longer explain. In that sense, the film’s most radical act is not what it shows, but what it allows Bella to claim without permission.
The Body as a Battleground: Feminist Readings of Creation, Desire, and Ownership
At its core, Poor Things stages the female body as a contested site, one claimed by science, patriarchy, romance, capitalism, and ideology long before it is allowed to belong to itself. Bella Baxter’s physical form is never neutral. From the moment she is reanimated, it becomes something to be studied, shaped, desired, corrected, and exploited.
What makes Lanthimos’ approach so provocative is that the film never pretends this struggle is subtle. Control over Bella’s body is overt, almost cartoonishly so, mirroring the blunt historical reality of how women’s bodies have been treated as public property disguised as private concern.
Creation Without Consent
Bella’s origin is inseparable from questions of authorship and violation. Godwin Baxter’s experiment is framed as benevolent, even loving, yet it begins with the ultimate removal of agency: a woman’s body repurposed without consent, then presented as a marvel of progress.
This is not incidental horror; it is foundational. The film draws a clear line between scientific creation and patriarchal entitlement, asking who gets to define life, intelligence, and value. Bella’s very existence is indebted to male authority, making her later struggle for self-definition all the more urgent.
Desire as Consumption
As Bella moves through the world, desire becomes another form of ownership. Men are drawn to her not despite her strangeness, but because of it. She is exoticized, infantilized, fetishized, and treated as a novelty to be sampled rather than a subject to be understood.
The film exposes how desire often masquerades as admiration while functioning as extraction. Bella is desired most intensely when she is least legible, least resistant, and least capable of naming what is being taken from her. Lanthimos makes this dynamic uncomfortable on purpose, forcing the audience to confront how easily curiosity becomes entitlement.
Reclaiming the Body Through Experience
Crucially, Poor Things does not position bodily autonomy as something granted through protection or restraint. Bella’s liberation comes through exposure, risk, and lived experience, even when those experiences are exploitative or painful. The film refuses the comforting idea that safety and empowerment are the same thing.
Her education is bodily before it is intellectual. Through movement, pleasure, labor, and exhaustion, Bella begins to understand where her body ends and others’ claims begin. Autonomy emerges not as purity, but as recognition.
Ownership, Labor, and Capital
The film also links bodily ownership to economic power. Bella’s body becomes a commodity, particularly once it enters spaces where desire is explicitly monetized. Sex work is not romanticized, but neither is it framed as moral collapse.
Instead, Lanthimos situates it within a continuum of labor, asking why some forms of bodily exchange are dignified while others are condemned. Bella’s growing awareness of how her body generates value for others sharpens her understanding of exploitation, not just sexually, but structurally.
A Body That Refuses Resolution
By the film’s end, Bella’s body is still read, judged, and projected onto. What changes is her relationship to those projections. She no longer internalizes them as truth, nor does she feel compelled to correct them.
Poor Things ultimately resists offering a neat feminist parable. The body remains a battleground, but one where Bella has learned how to stand her ground. In refusing to resolve the tension between vulnerability and agency, the film mirrors the unfinished, ongoing nature of bodily autonomy itself.
Yorgos Lanthimos’ Auteur Signature: Absurdism, Alienation, and Moral Discomfort
If Poor Things feels deliberately off-balance, that disorientation is not incidental. It is central to Yorgos Lanthimos’ cinematic language, which consistently uses absurdity to estrange the viewer from familiar moral frameworks. Rather than guiding audiences toward comfort or identification, Lanthimos insists on distance, making us watch human behavior as if it were slightly alien.
This approach allows the film’s most provocative ideas to surface without being softened by sentimentality. Autonomy, desire, and exploitation are not explained or justified; they are displayed, often grotesquely, and left to unsettle us. The discomfort is the point.
Absurd Worlds, Familiar Cruelties
Lanthimos’ worlds are heightened to the point of caricature, but their emotional logic remains disturbingly recognizable. In Poor Things, exaggerated performances, distorted architecture, and stilted social rituals create a fairy-tale unreality that paradoxically sharpens the film’s critique of real-world power dynamics.
By stripping behavior of naturalistic cues, Lanthimos makes cruelty feel systemic rather than personal. Characters do not exploit Bella because they are villains, but because the world has taught them that entitlement is normal. The absurdity exposes how arbitrary and constructed these norms truly are.
Alienation as Ethical Strategy
One of Lanthimos’ most consistent techniques is denying the audience easy emotional alignment. We are rarely told how to feel, and when empathy does emerge, it is often compromised or incomplete. In Poor Things, Bella’s rapid intellectual and sexual development prevents viewers from settling into a stable position of moral superiority.
This alienation forces active engagement. Rather than consuming Bella’s story as inspiration or tragedy, we are asked to interrogate our own reactions to her curiosity, her pleasure, and her vulnerability. The film implicates the viewer in the same structures of looking and judging that it critiques.
Moral Discomfort Without Resolution
Lanthimos resists moral clarity almost to the point of provocation. Scenes that might be framed as empowering are complicated by exploitation, while moments of apparent violation are rendered with unsettling neutrality. The film refuses to reassure us that progress is linear or that self-discovery is clean.
This refusal aligns with Lanthimos’ broader body of work, where ethical questions are posed but rarely answered. In Poor Things, autonomy is not a destination but a process riddled with contradiction. The lack of resolution is not evasive; it reflects the messy realities the film is examining.
Adapting McNamara Through a Lanthimos Lens
While Poor Things is adapted from Alasdair Gray’s novel, Lanthimos’ authorship is unmistakable. He amplifies the book’s satirical and philosophical elements while stripping away sentiment that might soften Bella’s journey. What remains is a leaner, more confrontational narrative that prioritizes sensation and structure over explanation.
The result is a film that feels both literary and brutally cinematic. Language gives way to bodies, ideas to images, and philosophy to physical experience. In Lanthimos’ hands, adaptation becomes transformation, bending the source material toward his ongoing obsession with how societies manufacture morality—and how individuals learn, painfully, to resist it.
From Page to Screen: How the Film Reinterprets Alasdair Gray’s Novel
Adapting Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things is less a matter of fidelity than of translation across mediums and sensibilities. Gray’s 1992 novel is a dense, metafictional artifact, layered with false documents, competing narrators, and deliberate uncertainty about who controls Bella Baxter’s story. Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara strip away much of that literary scaffolding, replacing textual ambiguity with visual and bodily experience.
What emerges is not a simplification, but a shift in emphasis. The film abandons the novel’s academic playfulness in favor of a more immediate confrontation with power, desire, and spectatorship. Where the book asks readers to question truth through language, the film forces viewers to question meaning through images.
From Unreliable Texts to Embodied Perspective
Gray’s novel famously presents Bella through conflicting male-authored accounts, framing her life as a debate rather than a lived reality. This structure satirizes Victorian authority and exposes how women’s narratives are shaped, edited, and distorted by institutions of knowledge. Bella, on the page, exists as much in footnotes and revisions as in action.
The film discards this framing almost entirely. Instead of arguing over who tells Bella’s story, Lanthimos places us inside her perceptual world, however disorienting or incomplete it may be. The camera becomes the unreliable narrator, exaggerating scale, color, and space to mirror Bella’s developing consciousness.
Satire Becomes Sensation
Gray’s prose leans heavily on political satire, particularly in its critique of imperialism, medicine, and bourgeois morality. These ideas remain present in the film, but they are no longer delivered through irony or intellectual distance. Lanthimos renders satire physical, sometimes grotesquely so.
Bella’s education unfolds through sensation rather than instruction. Sex, travel, and labor are not metaphors explained to us; they are experiences we must sit with, often uncomfortably. This choice aligns with Lanthimos’ broader rejection of didactic storytelling in favor of visceral confrontation.
A Feminist Shift in Narrative Control
Perhaps the most significant reinterpretation lies in how the film reorients the novel’s gender politics. Gray’s Bella is a feminist provocation filtered through male voices, intentionally compromised to expose structural bias. The film, by contrast, centers Bella’s agency even as it depicts her exploitation.
This does not mean the film offers a cleaner empowerment narrative. Instead, it foregrounds how autonomy is learned through error, pleasure, and exposure to harm. By removing the novel’s competing narrators, Lanthimos eliminates the buffer that once protected readers from Bella’s vulnerability.
Visual Worldbuilding as Ideological Statement
Gray’s alternative Victorian world is playful on the page, filled with anachronisms and political commentary. The film transforms this into an aggressively artificial universe of warped architecture and painterly compositions. The world looks constructed because it is, echoing how social systems shape and constrain identity.
This heightened aesthetic is not ornamental. It reinforces the idea that Bella is moving through a reality designed by others, one she must eventually recognize as contingent rather than natural. In this sense, production design becomes philosophy.
What the Film Leaves Behind—and Why It Matters
By abandoning the novel’s metafictional tricks, the film loses some of Gray’s literary wit and historical specificity. What it gains is urgency. Lanthimos is less interested in exposing how stories are written than in examining what happens when a person realizes she has been written at all.
The adaptation’s power lies in this exchange. Poor Things on film is not about correcting the novel, but about reimagining its questions for a medium that trades words for bodies, and ambiguity for confrontation.
The Ending Explained: What Bella’s Final Choice Really Means
By the time Poor Things reaches its final movement, Bella Baxter is no longer defined by the men who claimed authorship over her body or her mind. Her ending is deliberately quiet compared to the film’s earlier excesses, but it is no less radical. Lanthimos strips away spectacle to focus on a single question: what does self-determination look like once you’ve seen how power operates?
Bella’s Return Is Not a Regression
At first glance, Bella’s decision to return to Godwin’s house may feel like a narrative retreat, a symbolic step backward into the space where her life was first engineered. But the meaning hinges on who Bella is now, not where she goes. She returns with knowledge, scars, and a sharpened sense of agency, transforming the site of her creation into a place of choice rather than control.
This distinction matters. Earlier in the film, Bella moves through the world as an experiment passed between men, each convinced they understand her better than she understands herself. By the end, the same space can no longer contain her in the same way, because she is no longer legible to their frameworks.
The Rejection of Romantic Salvation
Crucially, Bella’s ending refuses the idea that freedom arrives through romantic alignment. Duncan, Max, and even Godwin represent different models of male authority: indulgent, moralizing, paternal. Bella’s final choice is not to belong to any of them, even when affection or familiarity remains.
This is where Poor Things quietly dismantles a familiar cinematic lie. Growth does not culminate in emotional completion through partnership. Instead, Lanthimos presents autonomy as something sustained internally, not bestowed by love or approval.
Autonomy Without Innocence
Bella does not emerge purified by experience. The film resists framing her journey as a moral education that replaces naivety with virtue. What she gains instead is discernment, an understanding of how desire, power, and cruelty intertwine.
This is why the ending feels unresolved in a conventional sense. Bella’s freedom is not safety, and it is not certainty. It is the capacity to choose with eyes open, even when the consequences remain unknowable.
Lanthimos’ Most Human Ending
For a filmmaker known for emotional distance and controlled cruelty, the final moments of Poor Things are strikingly tender. The camera lingers not to judge Bella’s choice, but to respect it. There is no ironic twist, no final punishment for her transgressions, and no corrective lesson imposed from above.
In this restraint, Lanthimos reveals the film’s deepest conviction. Liberation is not a spectacle. It is a condition that exists quietly, stubbornly, after the systems that once defined you have lost their authority.
Why Poor Things Resonates Now: Modern Gender Politics and the Joy of Self-Definition
If Poor Things feels especially urgent, it’s because it arrives in a cultural moment deeply skeptical of inherited narratives about womanhood, desire, and fulfillment. Bella’s journey mirrors a contemporary hunger for self-definition that refuses tidy labels, whether romantic, ideological, or moral. The film doesn’t argue for a single correct way to be free; it insists on the right to discover freedom on one’s own terms.
Lanthimos frames this insistence not as rebellion for rebellion’s sake, but as a recalibration of power. Bella’s awakening unfolds against systems that claim to protect, educate, or civilize her, systems that look uncomfortably familiar in modern debates about gendered autonomy. The absurdity of these structures becomes clearer as Bella outgrows them, exposing how often control masquerades as care.
Beyond Empowerment Narratives
Unlike many contemporary films about female liberation, Poor Things resists the language of empowerment as a final destination. Bella does not become a symbol, a role model, or a corrected version of femininity palatable to social norms. Her growth is messy, frequently uncomfortable, and unconcerned with external approval.
This refusal is key to the film’s modern resonance. Bella’s freedom does not depend on moral superiority, political correctness, or emotional maturity as defined by others. She is allowed to be contradictory, selfish, curious, and unresolved, a portrait far closer to lived experience than to cinematic idealization.
Sex, Agency, and the Rewriting of Innocence
The film’s provocative treatment of sexuality has sparked debate, but its purpose is less about shock than reclamation. Bella’s sexual curiosity is not framed as corruption or liberation in isolation, but as one expression of her broader desire to understand herself. In a culture still uneasy with female sexual autonomy, Poor Things insists that exploration itself is not a moral failing.
By divorcing sex from punishment or redemption, the film challenges a long-standing narrative that equates knowledge with loss. Bella does not fall from innocence; she sheds a fiction imposed upon her. What replaces it is not cynicism, but clarity.
A Feminist Fable Without Instructions
Poor Things ultimately functions as a feminist text precisely because it refuses to instruct. Lanthimos offers no manifesto, no clean allegory to decode, and no assurance that Bella’s choices will lead to happiness. What he offers instead is something rarer: trust in the character’s interior authority.
That trust feels radical in an era saturated with commentary about how women should live, love, and resist. Bella’s story suggests that liberation is not a shared script but an individual practice, shaped by experience rather than ideology.
In this way, Poor Things resonates not because it provides answers, but because it legitimizes the question. Who are you, when no one else gets to decide for you? The film’s lasting power lies in its quiet affirmation that self-definition, however strange or unfinished, is a joy worth claiming.