There is something deeply unsettling and truly fucked up, about being brought into the world by someone who believes that they have the right to your destiny, only because they created you.
Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things was adapted from Alasdair Gray’s novel. This film tells the story about Bella Baxter, a woman reanimated by the eccentric surgeon, Godwin Baxter, was given a second chance at life after her suicide. The premise, and much of what follows, is grotesque, absurdist, cheeky, and unmistakably gothic. Beneath the avant-garde costumes, the dissonant music, and Frankensteinian science, we find something humanistic: an account about becoming the master of your own story.
Lanthimos makes Bella’s transformation a visible metamorphosis on film. Early scenes use black-and-white filters and extreme fisheye lenses that warp the edges of her already confined world, making Godwin’s home feel enormous and claustrophobic at the same time.
As Bella ventures outward, the film erupts into hyper-saturated, almost artificial color; the world is overwhelming and gratuitous, because to Bella, everything is new. Gradually, those fantastical colors become more grounded as Bella becomes more educated, experienced, and self-directed. The visual metamorphosis parallels her own: from confinement, to sensory discovery, and finally, to a more refined understanding of reality.
Bella is given life by a man everyone calls God.
And God believes Bella belongs to him.
Initially, his possession appears almost benevolent. Godwin feeds her, studies her, protects her, and attempts to control the conditions under which she encounters the world. Bella is both his daughter and experiment. His affection for her may be genuine, but affection does not negate his control.
She’s an experiment. I must control the conditions otherwise the results will not be pure.
–God.
This becomes especially curious once we learn who Bella was before her resurrection. In her previous life, she was Victoria Blessington, a woman trapped in a marriage to the violent and possessive Alfie Blessington. Victoria attempts to escape that life through death and succeeds.
Bella awakens without those memories, but not without encountering the same old trope:
A man believes he has some claim over a woman’s life.
Max McCandless complicates Bella’s departure from God. Godwin arranges their engagement partly as another means of keeping Bella safely contained within his world, placing both his creation and her future husband beneath the same roof. Max cares for Bella, but their betrothal is still decided before Bella has developed the experience necessary to determine what marriage, or choosing a partner could mean to her.
Leaving God
Then Duncan Wedderburn arrives.
Duncan is hardly a liberator. He is selfish, possessive, hedonistic, and increasingly threatened by Bella’s independence. But symbolically, he serves another purpose. He is temptation.
Bella lives in God’s protected world until Duncan offers her something she has never truly possessed: access to the outside world and the unknown.
So Bella leaves God.
There is an almost biblical quality to this departure. She abandons the carefully controlled garden of her creator and follows a man promising pleasure and experience into a world she does not yet understand. Duncan can easily occupy the position of the proverbial devil, tempting Bella away from God and toward earthly indulgence, the same way that Eve challenged sovereignty by eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.
Except Poor Things does something interesting with the old myth.
Knowledge does not destroy Bella in the way that it brought ruin to Adam and Eve. Knowledge frees her since she departs without the seed of shame.
The more Bella experiences the world, the less governable she becomes.
At first, her discoveries are physical. She discovers pleasure through sex and approaches sexuality without the shame society expects her to carry. Duncan enjoys this freedom when he believes it belongs to him. He becomes considerably less enthusiastic when he realizes Bella’s sexuality belongs entirely to Bella.
That conflict follows her throughout the film. Men are fascinated by her freedom until that freedom interferes with their ability to possess her.
Bella continues on anyway.
The Education of Bella Baxter
Her education soon expands beyond the body. She reads and encounters philosophy. She witnesses indigence and begins questioning inequality. She meets people whose lives and ideas exist entirely outside the small universe in which God raised her. With every encounter, Bella acquires something more dangerous than sexual freedom, a worldview of her own and her ability to think about the world, critically.
Her understanding of the world initially resembles that of a child. She accepts what is immediately before her because she has little context with which to challenge it. Experience gives her context and reading gives her language. Meanwhile, other people like Martha von Kurtz, Harry Astley and Brothel Mother, Swiney, give her competing perspectives. Suffering adds layers to her understanding of pleasure. Education then allows her to organize all of it. Bella becomes capable of deciding what she believes.
That is extraordinarily threatening to anyone who previously benefited from deciding for her. This message is especially important in this time, where book burning and declining literacy rates exist.
Duncan cannot contain her.
God cannot indefinitely shelter her.
Alfie cannot restore “his Victoria”.
Bella has encountered too much of the world to comfortably return to someone else’s definition of who she should be.
Reclamation
Her sexuality becomes part of this education as well.
Bella’s time as a sex worker can easily be reduced to a triumphant narrative of sexual empowerment, but the film makes the situation more complex. Bella encounters the intersection of sex, money, labor, pleasure, exploitation, and survival and elevates herself in society.
Her body exists within systems that attempt to assign value to it. Duncan and Alfie call her a whore, reducing her to her time as a sex worker and using sexuality and purity as a measure of her worth. Her worth came from within.
Max becomes more important when Bella returns because he does something the other men in her life repeatedly struggle to do: he allows the person standing before him to belong to herself. He does not degrade Bella for the sexual experiences she had while away, nor does he punish her when she shares about her time as a sex worker.
More importantly, the relationship between Max and Bella develop around something beyond possession, a shared fascination with science, medicine, and understanding of the world. Max does not need Bella to return to the woman Godwin originally intended him to marry. He is willing to know the woman she has become. His love therefore offers an important counterpoint to Duncan and Alfie, one where intimacy does not require ownership, and loving someone does not grant authority over their autonomy.
Bella’s freedom means she increasingly possesses the ability to make choices herself, without a hierarchy of power making those decisions for her. Bella’s transformation therefore, isn’t linear; from oppression to empowerment. She experiments. She makes mistakes. She encounters cruelty. She discovers pleasure. She experiences disillusionment and she learns from it.
In simpler terms, she grows and reinvents.
Who Created Bella Baxter?
This leaves us with a peculiar question.
Who actually created Bella?
Godwin Baxter assembled her body and brought it back to life.
But is creation merely biological as we learned in the previous article, Reinvention in Frankenstein?
If Bella’s values, desires, intellect, boundaries, sexuality, politics, and understanding of herself develop through her own experiences, then Godwin can only claim responsibility for her conception.
Toinette, enters Bella’s life at a pivotal moment at the brothel. Bella’s desire for more profound connection and social curiosity was not satiated. Toinette’s friendship nurtured that seed. Bella encounters socialist thought, political philosophy, and a woman whose intellectual independence exists without the supervision of men. Toinette helps Bella develop language for inequalities she has already begun to witness but does not yet fully understand. Her education becomes larger than discovering who Bella wants to be; she begins questioning the kind of world in which Bella wants to live in.
This is where Poor Things becomes a humanist masterclass in becoming your own person and claiming authorship over your life.
Bella’s resurrection is not her reinvention.
Her resurrection is something done to her. It is a second chance at life she never asked for.
Her reinvention begins when she walks beyond the boundaries other people constructed around her and begins choosing what she wants to retain, reject, learn, and become.
By the end of the film, Bella has not returned to God as the obedient creation he once attempted to protect. Nor does she remain Duncan’s fantasy or “cute” plaything. And she does not return to Victoria’s imprisoned former self.
Perhaps that is why her story feels so satisfying beneath all the surrealism and absurdity. Most of us are not resurrected on an operating table, but we are all born into identities we did not entirely choose. Families, religions, cultures, lovers, institutions, and circumstances begin writing our stories before we understand that we are allowed to pick up a quill. 🪶
Eventually, if we are fortunate, curiosity intervenes.
We leave the proverbial garden and encounter the world.
Just like Bella, we learn.
We discover that being given a life and claiming that life as your own are two entirely different acts.
Godwin Baxter may have brought Bella to life.
But Bella Baxter chose what to do with it.
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