The cruelty of a thirty-second teaser for a movie that looks this fascinating! Thirty seconds is not enough to get the faintest idea of what’s going on in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, but it doesn’t matter that much anyway: When the director of Dogtooth and The Favourite makes a new movie, some of us will be there with bells on for opening night.
Especially when it includes a very baffled Mark Ruffalo saying, “… ow” to a slap from Emma Stone in a tone that implies that he has never before experienced the slightest discomfort in his life.
Here’s the synopsis:
From filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and producer Emma Stone comes the incredible tale and fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter (Stone), a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Under Baxter’s protection, Bella is eager to learn. Hungry for the worldliness she is lacking, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a slick and debauched lawyer, on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, Bella grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.
Poor Things is based on an award-winning 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, which the London Review of Books called “a magnificently brisk, funny, dirty, brainy book.” If you combine that summary with the particular oddness of a Lanthimos film—plus the aesthetic of this trailer, which has a faintly Terry-Gilliam-by-way-of-Wes-Anderson vibe but is entirely its own thing—you might, maybe, have a sense of what we’re in for.
Poor Things is in theaters September 8th.
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