‘Poor Things’ review: Emma Stone is a sex-crazed science experiment

Before she was an Oscar winner, Emma Stone was a sex comedy MVP.

The “La La Land” actress got her start in raunch-fests such as 2008’s “The House Bunny,” in which she played the leader of a sorority that invited a retired Playboy Playmate to be its house mother, and she took on the part of a teen outcast who faked hooking up with nerds for a quick buck in “Easy A” in 2010.

Thirteen years later, Stone has returned to the genre in the most messed-up way imaginable with “Poor Things,” the insatiably weird new film from Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos. The actress plays a Frankenstein’s monster who goes on a European adventure and, naturally, becomes an oddly inspiring nymphomaniac along the way.

Quite the elevator pitch.

This “Thing,” suffice it to say, will not be as easy to swallow for mainstream audiences as Stone’s past romps. The same is true of Lanthimos, whose “The Favourite,” which Stone co-starred in with Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz, was a Best Picture Oscar nominee in 2019. “Poor Things” is a far wilder ride.

Yet it’s one whose warped imagery — merging grand Gothic romance with “The Nightmare Before Christmas” — lingers nightmare-like in your mind long after the credits roll. And Stone’s fearless, witty and physical performance as Bella is major step in a career that increasingly favors the offbeat over big, boring paydays.

We first meet Bella when she’s a strange new science experiment of Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe, whose prosthetics leave a faint taste of Elephant Man), a controversial biologist. He has combined the body of a dead adult woman with the surgically implanted brain of a baby, and made the resulting creation his daughter. She calls him “God.”

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Lanthimos’ entire movie, which some viewers will find repulsive, is based around soldering unlikely ideas together. Kicking off in London, viewers are thrown into the director and production designers Shona Heath and James Price’s off-kilter Europe, which aesthetically fuses the 19th century with a “Jetsons”-esque future. Like a not-fraudulent P.T. Barnum, Baxter successfully sews a pig’s head onto a rooster’s body, which sums up this film quite nicely.

Can the studio’s marketers put the quote “’Poor Things’ is a pig’s head on a rooster’s body!” on a poster? 

At first, Bella behaves childishly and throws tantrums and smashes laboratory beakers, all the while taken care of by a smitten assistant named Max (Ramy Youssef). But as the girl ages, she starts to realize she’s really a Rapunzel who’s trapped in a tower and longs to experience the outside world. 

She finally gets her chance when Duncan (Mark Ruffalo), a lothario lawyer, whisks her off to Lisbon aboard an ocean liner and, finally, to Paris. 

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As Bella freshly takes in the continent’s pleasures and horrors, her antics are wickedly hilarious. Reliably offensive, she’s the drunk uncle who makes crude — but honest! — remarks at Christmas dinner.

Her worldview on-screen begins in black and white and gradually turns technicolor as she becomes more intellectually and sexually aware. It’s reminiscent of “Pleasantville,” only not so pleasant.

Besides the enjoyably pompous Ruffalo and daffy Dafoe, both terrific, Lanthimos has surrounded Stone with a feast of sublime character actors. 

Best is Kathryn Hunter, who was so frightening as the Weird Sisters in Ethan Coen’s “Macbeth,” playing a seedy brothel owner. And Christopher Abbott, who’s currently in the off-Broadway play “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” with Aubrey Plaza, unleashes his twisted side as a ghost from Bella’s mysterious past. 

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However, this freaky fairy-tale world is really a playground for Stone, whose willingness to be foolish and risky is a breath of fresh air amid all the polite Oscar-bait turns we’re handed this time of year.

Bella could easily be played as a flat cartoon, but like she did with Cruella de Vil and a sorority girl who’s besties with a Playboy Bunny, Stone can make anybody breathtakingly human.