Poor Things and a Vyx Cover Tease

I wrote a bit last week about the paucity of imaginative films chosen for Best Picture this year. That was before I had seen Poor Things. Available to rent on streaming services, I wish I’d seen it in the theater; its magnificent steampunk world is expressed in vibrant colors and sprawling wide-angle shots once its protagonist, the singular Bella Baxter, escapes confinement to sow her oats and explore the world.

Godwin Baxter is a Frankensteinian surgeon in many ways; he is brilliant and can both save and even reanimate life, but he is a walking puzzle-face of a man, a living experiment of his own father’s. Willem Dafoe plays him like Einstein, serious yet playful. One running gag is how he explains his tormented childhood and physical oddities to his student and mentee Max McCandles (played by Ramy Youssef). The outrageous experiment who is the subject of the film and its protagonist is Bella, played by Emma Stone, who is her own mother.

God (as they address him) found a pregnant suicide washed up in the river near the bridge, and transplanted the brain of the unborn child into the skull of the dead mother (who he could have reanimated, but had other ideas.) This is the plot of the novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray, who set it in Glasgow. Director Yorgos Lathimos sets it in a steampunk alternate Europe that is wonderful to behold, as we haven’t seen a rich background world like this since perhaps The Fifth Element and Blade Runner before it.

But back to Bella. It’s a disturbing concept, but Max is game; he’s stunned by Bella’s beauty and studies her development empirically, as God’s servant Mrs. Prim deals with the unpleasant caregiver’s realities of a toddler brain in a strong, adult body. This section is in black and white, and often seen through portholes and windows, like we’re spying on them. The film later blossoms into color, and I’m not sure if it’s meant to denote Bella’s development into childhood as infant brains can’t differentiate many colors for a few months, or if it’s Oz-like in that she has escaped confinement into the wide world, or both.

Everything changes once she discovers her adult body and how to induce pleasure. Max agrees to marry her, both out of love, and from God’s more practical reason, that she is not mentally an adult and needs a guardian; Bella has other plans. She’s seduced by Duncan Wedderburn, the lawyer hired to draw up the marriage contract, a fop and a cad, played with relish by Mark Ruffalo.

From there, the story is a whirlwind of sex, satire of “polite society,” and a brilliant untrained intellect learning the abusrdities of the world in a darkly hilarious manner. The visual entertainment is sharpened by a script by Tony McNamara peppered with delightful dialogue; Bella’s term for sex is “furious jumping,” and Stone’s delivery is perfect. She drives Duncan to madness as he thinks he’s got an easily controllable sex doll and she demands the freedom reserved for men.

While not perfect, it is never boring, and like The Favorite, the previous collaboration between Stone, McNamara, and Lathimos, it is sharp, lively, thought-provoking, sometimes shocking, but always entertaining. It joins Past Lives and The Holdovers as one of my favorite films of this year. I highly doubt it will capture any awards except visual effects or Adapted Screenplay, but maybe I’ll be surprised.

Speaking of stunning visual effects, take a gander at this detail from Kim Parkhurst’s cover art for Vyx Starts the Mythpocalypse:

Kim’s art inspired me to keep writing this novel with daring and abandon, and I’m honored and delighted to have her art on the cover as well. The book will be printed in full color with over two dozen illustrations, and there will be an online gallery for all the art that couldn’t be included in the book.

Stay tuned for an excerpt and a full cover reveal coming soon!