Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos and US actor Emma Stone are quite the collaborative powerhouse. Since working together on dark period comedy The Favourite (2018), which earned 10 Oscar nominations and seven Bafta wins, they have made the short film Bleat and the Oscar-tipped feature Poor Things, and shot another feature, currently entitled Kind of Kindness . Their working relationship is clearly nothing if not productive.
In Poor Things, which has been described as a “twisted science-fiction romantic comedy” (and that doesn’t get close to quite how strange it is), Stone plays Bella Baxter – a reborn 19th-century woman, living under the paternalistic care of Frankenstein-like surgeon Godwin Baxter (a makeup-laden Willem Dafoe), whom she calls “God” and who appears to have gifted her with the rapidly developing brain of a baby. While critics have struggled to define the film’s more outlandish elements, Stone says it’s a story about a woman “who doesn’t have to deal with shame”.
When I meet Lanthimos in London, the Oscar campaign around Poor Things is starting to heat up,
