Poor Things is weird and wonderful – but not so weird I had to Google it afterwards

I’ve heard a few people say that, based on the trailer, Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film, Poor Things, looks too weird for their tastes. To be honest, the trailer made me think this ‘gender-bending Frankenstein’, as it’s being sold, looked too weird for my tastes. But let’s be brave. It is Lanthimos after all (The Lobster, The Favourite), and it is the wonderful Emma Stone, whom we are always here for, so let’s not be too afraid. It is weird, no doubt. But it is the sort of weird we can do. And not so weird that I had to Google it afterwards. It has a simple narrative – a journey of self-discovery – that’s not a headscratcher at all. (I saw Studio Ghibli’s The Boy and the Heron over Christmas and I’ve been scratching my head ever since.)

The film is based on the novel by the late, great Alasdair Gray – or plundered from it you could say, as Lanthimos dispenses with its Scottishness and its multiple unreliable narrators.