Yorgos Lanthimos directs a sumptuous adult fairy tale featuring Emma Stone at her very best.

Here’s the thing about Yorgos Lanthimos: you’re either on board with him, or you’re not. Even in The Favourite, arguably his most accessible film, there’s a sort of joyful grotesqueness to it, leaving the audience laughing and wincing simultaneously. His latest offering, Poor Things, is his most visually dazzling film yet, with moments of stunning beauty and bittersweet insight, but still isn’t afraid to test the audience’s sensibilities. It’s a film about what it means to be alive, every little disgusting aspect of it. 

Based on Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, Poor Things opens in dreary black and white London, where eccentric scientist Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) is overseeing an experiment that’s both miraculous and horrifying. Baxter, whose face looks like it was carved into several pieces and then put back together the wrong way, has brought a woman back to life after she committed suicide. The woman, whom he’s renamed Bella (Emma Stone, with a magnificent pair of eyebrows), initially has the mind of a toddler, but she’s learning and maturing at an astonishing rate. Bella refers to Godwin as “God,” and so far knows no one and nothing else but him and their home together.

Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), Baxter’s naive young assistant, is taken with Bella, and Baxter encourages him to marry her, under the condition that they remain with Baxter indefinitely. Though she has no knowledge of or interest in the concept of “marriage,” Bella agrees, but before they go through with it, she meets Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, in delightfully hammy, mustache-twirling villain mode), a slick lawyer who’s also taken with her. “I have very little to offer in the way of constancy, just adventure,” Duncan tells Bella, but that offer is impossible to resist, and she leaves with him, insisting that she’ll eventually return and marry Max after she’s seen the world.

Baxter, pragmatically accepting that, along with language and motor skills, Bella has also developed free will, lets her go, and suddenly for Bella the world explodes into glorious, hyper-realistic color. With Duncan as her guide, she discovers the decadent pleasures of both good food and debauched sex, or rather, “furious jumping,” as Bella refers to it. The honeymoon doesn’t last long, however, when it becomes apparent that Duncan only finds her untamed nature attractive in private, while around his dull friends, he expects her to be demure and well-mannered, normal. 

As Bella matures, Duncan grows more childish, sulking, throwing tantrums, and snatching books out of her hand, threatened by her thirst for knowledge. This wasn’t what he signed up for, after all: he expected an idiot child in the body of an adult woman, a mindless lump of clay to do with as he pleased until he got bored and sent her home. But Bella is endlessly, sometimes exhaustingly curious about the world, about people, about herself, approaching it all with a scientific mind, whether it’s befriending strangers on a cruise ship, or working at a brothel because she needs money, and it seems like the most logical thing she can do at that particular moment. To her, everything is worth knowing, both the good and the bad, because it’s all part of being alive.

In less capable hands, Bella Baxter could have easily come off as an offensive caricature, especially in the film’s earliest scenes, when she clumsily staggers around Godwin Baxter’s home like a broken doll and struggles to speak and eat properly. But with Emma Stone playing her, there’s a raw intelligence in Bella from the very first moment we meet her. Her eyes sparkle with it, and it’s easy to see why nearly everyone she encounters is immediately drawn to her, even if it’s often for the wrong reasons. The men who underestimate her and think she can be easily controlled do so at their own peril. They think they’re using her, but in actuality, she’s using them. They’re merely part of the data she’s collecting in a grand experiment.

Poor Things maintains a tight balance between beauty and vulgarity, a perfect tone for its Victorian-era setting. Of all of Lanthimos’ films, it’s so far the most outwardly funny, as exhibited by such moments as, following Bella’s departure, Max asking Baxter “Do you think she’s alright?” and then smash cutting to Bella having athletic girl-on-top sex with Duncan. It also emphasizes the absurdity of male hypocrisy, such as Duncan, a libertine who boasts numerous times about his sexual prowess, absolutely losing his marbles at the news that Bella has allowed another man to pleasure her. The men she meets are all attracted to her perceived wildness, but shrivel up in anger and jealousy when it becomes apparent that they’re not the only ones who have enjoyed it.

Incorporating dazzling futuristic steampunk touches (such as wire-suspended trolleys cutting across candy-colored skies) and no small amount of body horror, Poor Things is bold, occasionally (though amusingly) repugnant, and unexpectedly moving. Bella Baxter is experiencing life at one hundred miles a second, thrown into a world that isn’t ready for her, and isn’t meant for the curious.

Poor Things opens in limited release December 8th & nationwide December 22nd.