Poor Things review: sumptuous and strange comedy-drama starring Emma Stone

With the new year only a few weeks old, "the first must-see film of 2024" has arrived, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. "You may come out of 'Poor Things' thinking it's just way too weird, that it's a tad too long, but my goodness you'll want to have seen it."

Set in an "art-deco-meets-steampunk London", and directed by the Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos ("The Favourite"), it stars Emma Stone as Bella, a young woman who tries to take her own life while she is pregnant. A celebrated surgeon, Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), then revives her by transplanting her baby's brain into her head, leaving her with the body of a woman but a toddler's mentality.

As Bella's mind matures, she discovers sex (or "furious jumping", as she calls it), and soon seizes the opportunity to go on a sex-filled adventure with Baxter's caddish lawyer (Mark Ruffalo).

"What ensues is a peripatetic, episodic and often very funny" tale, in a film that is surely Lanthimos's "masterpiece". Loosely based on Alasdair Gray's cult novel, the film looks ravishing, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator: the sets are "fantastically outlandish and Gaudí-esque" and the costumes "sensational". And though it flags towards the end, it's mostly "marvellously entertaining". You'll not "be able to take your eyes off Stone", who is brilliant as Bella in "each stage of her development, from a child taking her first steps to a grown woman who won't be pushed around".

"Poor Things" is frequently lit up by "bright flashes of wit", and it has a "strutting confidence" that is almost infectious, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. But it's also exhausting and rather too pleased with itself; and though Bella is a "wonderful creation", she "brings out the side of Stone that makes you feel you're watching someone's very talented child stealing the school play".

It does unfortunately become rather "monotonal, flat and dull" as it goes along, agreed Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. Its design might be "rich", but its ideas are "thin". "Poor Things" certainly "won't be everyone's cup of tea", said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail; but I must say "I loved it".

A "wildly imaginative, irrepressibly mischievous, exhilarating roller-coaster of a movie", it's perhaps best described as a "feminist voyage of discovery in the form of a gothic horror-comedy". Some people might find it "challenging, even insufferable", but if you ask me, "it's a proper tour de force, already certain to be the most singular film of the year".

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