Poor Things

How this film uses it

Bella Baxter has an adult body and a mind that is only just developing. Nobody has taught her how to behave, she feels no shame and she doesn't see why she should act as expected. Her trip through Victorian society is fish-out-of-water comedy at its most radical. This fish is philosophically free, which is different from naive. She refuses to take on the water's conventions, and that shows how arbitrary they are.

Where to see it

Bella's first encounters with social convention. The comedy comes from the gap between what she does and what she is expected to do, and from the fact that she is never embarrassed.

How this film uses it

Robbie Ryan's cinematography moves the film through distinct color stages as Bella's mind develops. The washed-out black-and-white of the opening gives way to full color as she grows. The colors chart Bella's inner life, so the world gets more vivid the more deeply she engages with it.

Where to see it

The transition from monochrome to color. The look of the film follows Bella's growing mind, and the world literally brightens as she becomes more herself.

How this film uses it

Lanthimos and Ryan use fish-eye lenses in many scenes, which are extremely wide and bend the picture. The architecture of Victorian England warps at the edges, and the film's social world looks both real and grotesque. The distortion makes the film's point: seen clearly, this society is as strange as anything Bella does within it.

Where to see it

The Lisbon and Paris sequences. The wide-angle distortion makes the European social world Bella moves through feel magnificent and deeply odd at once.

How this film uses it

Godwin Baxter literally built Bella's mind. Her brain is that of a foetus placed in an adult body. The film never fully settles whether her experience of the world is a real mind developing or a scientific experiment running its course. That uncertainty is the film's philosophical question. That is, what makes a self real?

Where to see it

Bella's increasingly sophisticated philosophical statements. The film deliberately leaves open whether you are watching real growth or programmed behavior.