Yorgos Lanthimos turns a Frankenstein-adjacent premise into something stranger and funnier with Poor Things, an odyssey through Victorian-inflected sets and a heroine who has to learn the world from nothing.
What is Poor Things about?
Bella Baxter is not an ordinary young woman - she has been brought back to life by Dr. Godwin Baxter, a brilliant and eccentric scientist, and now moves through the world discovering everything for the first time: language, desire, morality, and the people who try to shape her. As Bella pushes past the walls Godwin built around her, the film follows her outward into unfamiliar cities and stranger company, tracking a mind assembling itself in real time rather than a life already formed.
About the cast
Emma Stone stars as Bella Baxter, with Willem Dafoe as Dr. Godwin Baxter and Mark Ruffalo as one of the men who enters her orbit. Ramy Youssef, Jerrod Carmichael, Christopher Abbott, Margaret Qualley and Suzy Bemba fill out the supporting cast.
Context & significance
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Poor Things is a comedy-drama with romance and science-fiction threads, produced across Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States. It carries the director's familiar taste for the stylized and the off-kilter, built around ornate, theatrical production design rather than a conventional realist look. The film sits in the tradition of stories about creation and self-discovery while keeping its own distinct, mordant sense of humor throughout. Lanthimos leans on a large ensemble to carry that tone, letting each new character Bella meets pull the story into a different register, from comedy of manners to something closer to satire.
Watching Poor Things on Ktime
Poor Things is available on K-Time with a free account login - no purchase step beyond signing in. It streams with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, giving Farsi-speaking viewers the choice of a dubbed track or the original dialogue with Farsi subtitles, in keeping with K-Time's focus on the Iranian diaspora.