In Victorian London, medical student Max McCandles finds work as an assistant to the brilliant but unorthodox scientist Godwin Baxter . Max finds himself enamoured with Bella Baxter , who is a medical experiment of Godwin's and has been reanimated following her death.
That's probably the point, of course, as 'Poor Things' is really a story about the expansion of the human mind and how sensory experiences shape and form it. Emma Stone's character is introduced as a sort of Lady Frankenstein, all blank expression and unformed sentences, but as the movie progresses and her store of knowledge increases by her experiences, we see the personality and the form take shape.
Mark Ruffalo is settling into a wonderful segment of his career, as he plays the shiftless gadabout with a kind of gusto and energy not seen since the likes of Peter Sellers or George Sanders. Willem Dafoe, likewise, may be unrecognisable underneath the prosthetics, but his presence and performance is unmistakable. Kathryn Hunter turns up in the latter half of the story as a Parisian madame, while Ramy Yousseff and Christopher Abbott play competing suitors for Stone's affections.