If The Favourite (2018) showcased an auteur being born, Poor Things is a living proof of a new auteur fully established. However, I assign the equal amount of importance to another fact which makes this film extremely relevant in the landscape of celluloid: this feature proves the connection and apprenticeship from Nikos Nikolaidis that Lanthimos had all along, especially since Kynodontas (2009), and we’ve arrived to a time where an Academy that had even more shocking levels of conservatism in film appreciation than today has been more open-minded to experiments like this, which you would only be seeing at Cannes since the 1950s and most importantly the 1960s (explain the lack of attention given to, let’s say, Seconds and Chimes at Midnight in 1966).

This is the proper time to stress it again: Nikolaidis is the most unique Greek filmmaker in history, and this statement includes Theodoros Angelopoulos, Antouanetta Angelidi, Alexis Damianos, Mihalis Kakogiannis, Yorgos Javellas, Nikos Koundouros, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Frieda Liappa, Orestis Laskos and Athina Rachel Tsangari, to mention my first 10 top-of-mind contributors to cinema. That does not necessarily make him the best, but certainly positions him in the top 3 in my books: extreme transgression, concern for the future (something he coined as “the shape of the coming nightmare”), Greece’s identity before and after membership of the European Union, the physical and audiovisual desecration of film-noir, apocalyptic dystopias, and the illusion of complete societal and economic control while focusing on social outcasts of all social strata. Nikolaidis has no comparison in Greece and has very few parallelisms outside Greece that extend, only loosely, to Otto Preminger, Serbian provocateurs and Italian shockers.

The reception of Poor Things is quite interesting: the Generation Z in its great majority (not everyone, as totalizations are an illusion), the ones that seek to be offended by everything and attack people online, the ones that express themselves with horrible grammar that lack a complete sense of the usage of punctuation and capitalizing sentences after a new idea starts because the run-on logic reigns today, the ones that have plagued every film with one-liner "jokes" that people mistake as "reviews" and proving that saying “that’s the voice of Shrek’s donkey bitch” will give you 16K free likes, the ones that practice cultural, gender, religious and racial appropriation as their favorite everyday sport, have reacted with repulse to this film as a bad representation of "feminism". Yes, watching the protagonist from La La Land and Easy A sharing screentime with some “Avengers cast members” has resulted in outrage and disgust at what is displayed on screen, while the counterparty screams, incorrectly: “This depicts feminism at its finest! Women fought for equal rights for years and now you complain!”. It’s not only a merciless fight, but also a futile one, an incoherent and ridiculous mess. I wish I could gather all these thousands of young “cinephiles” and expose them to the mastery that is Euridice BA 2037 (1975) and, most importantly, Singapore Sling (1990), one of the most important films of its decade while watching them faint, if not vomit or just walking out from “our depraved generation that enjoys Saló (1975) and Last Tango in Paris (1972) because we are children molesters, women haters and rape apologists”, as many people have shouted at me without the site’s moderation batting an eye (this gets a pass, though).

Christian youth is not excluded from this criticism, and I'm calling the ones with private servers that secretly laugh at profiles and making complete psychological profiles from people based solely on their activity online, and also on their film ratings and highly inaccurate Google Translations of foreign languages (I kid you not) instead of engaging in a clarifying and edifying intellectual discourse, completely dismissing the following callings:

-Matthew 18: 21-22.- Always forgive your brother
-Matthew 7:5.- Acknowledge your flaws instead of hypocritically judging others
-Matthew 5: 23-24.- God will not take your faith and offerings in a good light if you have a conflict with your brother
-Romans 12:18.- Live at peace with everyone
-2 Timothy 2:14.- Discuss only relevant matters instead of quarreling about words; it affects also the public testimony
-James 4:12.- You are no one to judge; only God can

I never intervened in their mockery of others. However, this “church” has reportedly said: “if you see people that praise Poor Things, block them immediately”. If the Biblical universal church stands for unity and every member has a specific role in the body of Christ and spreading God’s Word (1 Corinthians 12: 12-27), and only God can judge, who are you to divide? Or, who is it that divides? Who owns the spirit that is in charge of separating?

And so, this film has set the table for relevant discourse. The term “feminism” today has been horridly distorted today through fundamentalist and extremist definitions, and one good example is Barbie (2023): the practice we see today and practical people clearly exposing the problem live in constant conflict. If we abide by the objective definitions of feminism, many disputes end: “the advocacy of women's rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes”. If you break the equality in the process handling rights, you’re not defending feminism anymore.

Hence, Lanthimos’ magnum opus should be removed from the “feminism” tag, just like Daisies (1966) and Celine and Julie Go Boating (1975): they are all fantasy fables. The title is the most tragic aspect of the film itself, as well as the opening sequence. Submerged in Gothic inspiration, the masterful artistic and visual style of the film perfectly (and intentionally) correlates with Bella’s gradual loss of innocence, shifting from a childlike perspective of the world pervaded by innocence until the tragic understanding of the current state of the realities of a Godless world that has, currently, another owner (Luke 4:6; Ephesians 2:2; 2 Corinthians 4:4). Idealism and philanthropic desires die slowly as the exploration of humankind’s axiomatic evil and cruelty (Romans 3: 10-18). Through Mary Shelley’s tints, we see the creature being humanized, if we define the process of humanization as the whole process previously described: unraveling the realities of our inherent evil. Hence, the strongest cinematic connection to this film, besides Singapore Sling (1990), is Bride of Frankenstein (1935): in this unguided process of the world’s temporary pleasures and the resulting void of not finding perpetual happiness in any of them, including the sexual discovery of oneself (inspired by Ripstein’s The Castle of Purity [2009] that Lanthimos ripped off in 2009, I’ll keep insisting), you get lost, deviated, perverted to the extreme, depicting precisely what God warned us about through Paul: fornication (1 Corinthians 6: 18-20) and prostitution. The male-dominated society does play an important part in Bella’s mental (d)evolution: women are societally handicapped. However, her childlike mind (Mattew 18:13) is a reminder of the most... simple and practical solutions, the ones that keep being interrupted by the lack of desire to give oneself to Christ and justifying their lives instead (Luke 16:15).

Finally, from a technical (and an additional thematic) standpoint, we have unbelievable artistic set-pieces and a fantastic humor throughout, but there is also the famous God complex factor. If you can’t control your own life, how can we think we can create life from the dead? If we could resurrect others, what is the use if the lives we resurrect are not sustained with dignity? The female creations in this film are puppets that end up escaping a man’s sense of control, but despite the “scientific” breakthrough this represented, the void in the “scientist” never disappeared. Throughout, we have multiple silent film techniques, CGI partitions, impressionistic fisheye lenses that spare no corner, and a camera that invades all spaces, everything constructing an opera out of control, perfectly balanced by the Nikolaidis successor.

96/100