Watching Poor Things is an experience and not always a pleasant one. The movie is a massive assault on your senses, with lavish sets, outrageous costumes, and whimsical designs. You do not so much as watch Poor Things as you endure it. However, when I set aside the sensory overload, I found a flimsy story of female empowerment that feels like something a teenage boy would produce.

Let’s begin with the premise. Set in a hyper-stylized Victorian London, we watch a young woman, Bella (Emma Stone), leap from a bridge to her death. Bella is reborn with the help of brilliant, freakish surgeon Goodwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Bella is now a Frankenstein-style monster wandering the halls of Baxter’s estate with the mind of a child.

Yearning for adventure, Bella embarks on a whimsical coming of age journey. She meets a goofball attorney, Duncan Wetterbottom, a frumpy Mark Ruffalo armed with some atrocious accents. She changes outfits a few times, then has sex…a lot of sex. The next hour of Poor Things is filled some blush inducing sex scenes.  All this furious humping starts out funny and rapidly devolves into gratuitous. This is not titillating sex. It is gross, awkward, teenagers-fumbling-in-the-back-of-a-car kind of sex. To add insult to injury, the director’s idea of how Bella discovers herself is to become a prostitute. This is a tired and trite trope that only diminishes Bella as a character.

Somewhere during all this humping, the secret to Bella’s revival is revealed. It seems that when Bella threw herself from the bridge, she was very pregnant.  So the good doctor Baxter transplanted the brain from her unborn infant into Bella’s head.

Eh, what the hell?

I could handle this bizarre concept in the context of a horror movie. However, as a plot point in a movie about a woman’s coming age, it feels like something straight out of a Nazi medical experiment. This revelation made everything feel multiple times more icky. With each passing scene of sex, all I could think about was the child’s mind inside this woman’s body. It made me extremely uncomfortable.

Later in the movie we learn of the motivations for Bella’s suicide. She was married to an evil man who treated her as a property. She killed herself to deprive him of her and their baby. There is a whole side story there that does not get much development.  It almost feels tacked on to make us feel better about watching baby brain babe hump dudes.

Then Bella becomes a genius, takes over Dr. Baxter’s estate, and everybody adores her. In the end she is a fully realized woman … with the brain of a baby and probably a whole Petri dish of venereal diseases.

Whatever.

On top of this weird plot, we have the over-the-top production design. The sets are lavish and stylish, with a touch of steampunk aesthetic. The look of the movie is impressive. Every scene feels like it was carefully constructed to be as eye-catching as possible. There is a seamless blend of CGI and practical. However, not all the style elements work. The view sometimes distorts into pin-hole images, which defy explanation. Maybe there is some deeper message in that, but it flew by me.

If there is a bright spot of Poor Things, it is Emma Stone. She takes this role as seriously as anybody cloud. I also admire her devotion to the craft.  She has no shame with all the nudity and sex scenes. She won an acadamy award for her performance, and I can see why. Bella is a unique character, and she poured her soul into the performance.

The problem with Poor Things is director Yorgos Lanthimos. He has some weird ideas about design, storytelling, movie making, sex, brain surgery, and pretty much everything else. I watched his previous movie, The Lobster, a few years ago. It too is a pretentious pile of poo. I am unsure what message Lanthimos is trying to convey with Poor Things. It feels like he wanted to do a monster movie, but also wanted to do a story about women empowerment.  He rammed these two parts together and brought life to something truly hideous. I do not hate Poor Things, but I do not need to see it again either.

I suppose if you can look past the deeply creepy premise, you may enjoy it. I am still traumatized from the intersection of a naked Emma Stone and the whole baby brain thing.