Emma is stone-cold phemonenal in a wild ride

NEARLY six years after the success of The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos returns with Poor Things, an incredible story that bears more than a hint of Frankenstein or Coppelia but with touches of Tim Burton to boot.

- Jo-Ann Titmarsh

Poor Things 131 mins, cert 18

★★★★★

Based on Alisdair Gray’s 1992 novel of the same name, the film takes place at an unspecified date, but probably the end of the 1800s. A woman (Emma Stone), dressed in blue silk, throws herself from Tower Bridge. The following scenes are in black and white: we are introduced to Bella Baxter (Stone) and her adoptive father Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Reanimated by Baxter with the brain of a baby, Bella is a childlike figure, spitting out food she dislikes, stumbling through the house like a toddler. He’s an eminent surgeon with terrible scars crisscrossing his face and to Bella he is God (short for Godwin, but you get the picture).