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Written by: Tony McNamara (screenplay), Alasdair Gray (novel)
Directed by: Yorgos Lanthimos
Starring: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Yousef, Margaret Qualley
Rated: R
Watch the trailer
Plot
The incredible tale about the fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter, a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter.
Verdict
This is a spin on Frankenstein's monster through gender and society's pressure to conform. It's bizarre and beautiful, considering what it means to be a woman in the nineteenth century and how that compares to modern day. We see Bella grow and learn while operating outside the bounds of society.
Watch It.
Review
Lanthimos movies can be such a trip. They are strange yet creative, always giving you lots of ideas to consider. He's a director I'm always going to watch.
This is wild from the start. If Dafoe's Dr. Baxter's scarred face didn't clue you in that he's a mad scientist, the dog with a duck head will. He's a scientist in the loosest sense and Bella (Emma Stone) is his latest creation. He's created this woman that is mentally stunted, hiring Max (Ramy Youssef) to watch her. Max is curious, but Baxter is evasive when it comes to answers. It's clear she's a child in a woman's body.
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| Emma Stone plays Bella Baxter |
This has a distinct look. The scale of the house around Bella is meant to make her look childlike. Stone does an incredible job capturing Bella at a wide range of ages as the movie progresses.
This is a very direct coming of age story. Bella discovers herself and that's really when the movie takes off. Baxter pushes Max to marry her. While Max is fascinated with her, I can't fathom why he would marry her. She has the mindset of a child. That's the thing. As uncomfortable as that is, it wasn't uncommon for men to marry actual children which is all the more distressing. You could argue Max wants to study her, but it also could be that he sees an advantageous situation.
Duncan (Mark Ruffalo) takes advantage of the situation to marry Bella first. He shows her the world, but part of this movie is the world taking advantage of Bella. She doesn't know any better, but that doesn't make it less wrong. That's the conflict in this movie. Bella enjoys herself. She doesn't do anything because it's nice, she does what makes her happy. She's naive and rudely blunt, but the world around her wants to take advantage of her and does. It's insidious. Bella discovers the problems with the world; being a woman and being poor. There's a lot of subtext and interpretation.
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| Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo play Bella Baxter, Duncan Wedderburn |
Finding out Bella's origin isn't the end of this. We see her first husband, and he's not nice. The Bella he knows is not the Bella we've been watching. She's smarter and more aware now. More than that, she's unwilling to succumb to the social pressures of what it means to be a good woman and wife as decried by men in her world. She didn't have gender roles forced on her at a young age. She was introduced to them and rejected them, getting a much different education.
The conclusion is that women are forced into certain roles, indoctrinated before they know any better. Given the chance, or absence of what society deems they should do, their decisions would be much different. Bella, with her new experiences, is unwilling to tolerate an unfit husband. Before this movie started, she was in a hateful marriage with few options.
As with Lanthimos's movies, it concludes and I wonder what I just watched. There's a lot to unpack. It's the type of movie you think about for a few days, processing. Visually this is amazing with a distinct use of color, and worth watching for the imagery along. The production design adds to the expression as it creates an over the top nineteenth century.
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