Poor things, Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023

A woman who charts her own course towards freedom, this could very well be the logline of Poor things.

A cross between Frankenstein and Ulysses, Lanthimos' Bella Baxter is an explorer with a thirst for knowledge. A knowledge that has scientific research as a trigger, as a triggering factor and philosophical and psychological investigation as a checkpoint of the experimentation. The theory that requires empirical data to be demonstrated, tested and proven.
Bella Baxter is a new Eve shaped from nothing by a god-scientist, Godwin, in fact. A new prima donna, experiment daughter of an experiment in her turn. She is her own daughter and mother.

Bella's journey is a navigation between dreamlike Dalinian and metaphysically De Chirico landscapes. The alleys of a pictorial and ideal Lisbon trace the meanders of a curious mind that simultaneously investigates itself and the world outside. Each stage of the journey is a question which in the answer generates another question. Knowledge is erotic, an unsatisfied desire that creates addiction. Ethical doubts are an inevitable side effect that appear at the crossroads, at the bifurcations of every road which from a certain point onwards can take two opposite directions: love and pleasure, respect and freedom, happiness and violence , enthusiasm and dejection.
By discovering, Bella Baxter grows, learns to walk, to express herself, to be in the world. Moving from empathy to anger, from darkness to reach the light of awareness. Because we must experience not only good but also horror, so we can know the world and when we know the world the world is ours.

Bella Baxter is the representation of life as a process in perpetual movement and change, impossible to trap and define absolutely. It is the demonstration that a method works and is valid until another is found and then things done in a certain way start to be done in another. Bella Baxter is the image of an intelligence capable of surfing the wave of change, finding a dangerous and adrenaline-filled balance balanced on the crest of her, without ever being overwhelmed by it. Bella Baxter is the simple question that no one has yet had the courage to ask because the answer requires a change of perspective.

Bella Baxter is 'a woman who charts her own course towards freedom' and does not do so with the awareness of being a woman but of a human being, far surpassing, with highly refined intelligence and a notable breadth of vision, the abused and now sterile.
Bella Baxter is elusive and untaggable.
Bella Baxter is the logic of reason that marries the panache of imagination, she is the knowledge of the rules that is needed to break them, she is the colorful drawing outside the lines.
Bella Baxter is a superlative Emma Stone and Lanthimos' 'poor creatures' are anything but poor.