Last updated on September 3, 2023
A film by Yorgos Lanthimos
With: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Jerrod Carmichael, Margaret Qualley, Christopher Abbott, Damien Bonnard, Kathryn Hunter, Suzy Bemba
Bella Baxter is brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter. Hungry for the worldliness she is lacking, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn, a slick and debauched lawyer, on a whirlwind adventure across the continents.
Our Review: **(*)
Yorgos Lanthimos adapts a fantasy-filled tale that perfectly suits his visual imagination and formal ambitions. More linear and limpid than his earlier, more philosophical and disturbing works, the spirit of the book inspires him to create Gaudiesque settings, with Lisbon, London and Paris all reconstructed in the studio. He offers Emma Stone a role far more sulphurous than her usual scores, since it is largely centered on the question of a sexuality stripped of all preconceptions. The Frankenstein myth, revisited with provocation (a baby’s brain grafted onto its own mother’s body), but also with a form of modernity (feminine, in other words), gives Lanthimos ample opportunity to invite recurring figures and themes into his cinema: questioning monstrosity, the relationship between man and animal, the boundaries between these 2 conditions that he likes to imagine/construe as porous (in the manner of Orwell). So, even if it’s a case of creative surgery, we find – although it’s not part of the original story – chickens with pig heads or dogs with goose heads gravitating around the princess’s “castle”. Slightly sulphurous because it’s hypersexualized, the tale is not at all fairytale-like, and offers some lovely moments, be they comic, dreamlike or more to do with the question the book raises: if a woman were to be born free, what would she be, and the world, like?
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