Poor Things overview: Emma Stone offers virtuoso show in bonkers romp | Films | Entertainment | EUROtoday

The bizarre and the fantastic frolic hand in hand in Yorgos Lanthimos’s deranged coming-of-age fairy story.

Torn from the pages of Alasdair Gray’s novel, Poor Things reunites the director of Oscar-winning interval comedy The Favourite with screenwriter Tony McNamara and actress Emma Stone for a fantastical, feminist reimagining of Frankenstein.

Here, the pungent Glaswegian setting of Gray’s e book has been changed with an equally lurid steampunk imaginative and prescient of late Nineteenth-century London. Every aspect of the movie is polished and epic.

Jaw-dropping manufacturing design, together with elaborate road scenes and interiors common by hand as an immersive playground for the actors, seduce the attention.

Costumes are ravishing and director of images Robbie Ryan strikes seamlessly from black and white within the opening 25 minutes to color because the movie’s fearless heroine blazes a path into the surface world, blissfully unaware of the period’s tightly corseted conventions.

Stone’s virtuoso portrayal of Bella Baxter – a medical experiment granted life when Willem Dafoe’s mad scientist transplants the mind of a child into an grownup’s physique – defies superlatives. She commits ferociously to her embodiment of a wide-eyed harmless untouched by cynicism or self-censorship.

When an toddler’s piercing cries disturb Bella, she coolly proclaims: “I must punch that baby!”

Subtle adjustments in her language fluency, posture and bodily actions present a transparent roadmap of the character’s white-knuckle joyride from infancy to maturity. Full-frontal nudity turns into commonplace in service of the zany plot.

Dafoe’s accent (appropriated from Gray’s e book) hikes round Celtic nations however doesn’t settle in a single location. Mark Ruffalo is extra assured as a moustachioed dandy, who lures Bella away from her guardian for a globe-trotting odyssey of sexual experimentation.

“Bella discover happy when she want,” she whoops, with deliberately stilted vocabulary, having simply discovered the artwork of self-pleasure with a bit of fruit.

Lanthimos’s bonkers escapade is a peach.

POOR THINGS IS OUT NOW IN UK CINEMAS