Recently watched: Poor Things (2023). Think of it as The Bride of Frankenstein meets My Fair Lady. I recommend it but with caveats as this film is ultra-divisive! I found Poor Things lively and intriguing, but my boyfriend Pal’s immediate response as the end credits rolled was, “I hated it!” The distinctive off-kilter vision of Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos is one you either like or you don’t. (You require a high tolerance for fisheye lenses, plinky-plonky discordant music and CGI sunsets. Pal loathed Lanthimos’ earlier film The Favourite (2018) too, so I was surprised he was keen to see Poor Things). Anyway, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave Poor Things five out of five stars and called it a “toweringly bizarre epic … a steampunk-retrofuturist Victorian freakout and macabre black-comic horror” and I thought it was bold, sweeping storytelling. The performances of Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo are justifiably receiving acclaim, but the supporting cast is exceptionally noteworthy: British character actress Vicky Pepperdine as the appropriately named housekeeper Mrs. Prim (I love her appalled delivery of the line, “She grabbed my hairy business!”); still-glamorous 80-year-old former R W Fassbinder muse Hanna Schygulla as a sybaritic cruise passenger; stage actress Kathryn Hunter as Swiney, the reptilian and ornately tattooed madam of a Parisian brothel and even avant-garde British chanteuse Keeley Forsyth (the closest equivalent we have to a modern Nico) makes an impression in a blink-and-you-miss-it appearance as a maid.
