In 2023, anti-sex-scene discourse online hit a fever pitch, as Tweets polled users on the "most unnecessary sex scene of all time" and TikToks suggested ways for married, adult viewers to avoid sex and nudity on screen. This was all obviously childish — all movie scenes are "unnecessary" in some way, and being puritanical only reduces the ability of writers and directors to characterize and differentiate their stories — but so it goes. 

In that regard, Poor Things, the latest from director and Greek hometown hero Yorgos Lanthimos, is an entertaining and sex-filled breath of fresh air compared to the increasingly conservative fare from major studios, even though its script fizzles out, Mark Ruffalo has way too much screentime, and the movie ultimately leaves some more interesting gender politics to be desired.

In a steampunk parallel-universe Victorian England, mad scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (heavy-handedly referred to as "God") finds a pregnant woman's corpse in a river and reanimates her as Bella, replacing her brain with that of her unborn-but-still-living baby. Speaking in broken English, exhibiting limited gross and fine motor skills, and relying on a highly simple worldview, Bella is a baby in all ways besides her adult physical form. Of course, this is unfortunately appealing to men, and soon enough God's assistant medical student Max and God's lawyer Duncan both make known their attraction to Bella. Max proposes, Bella accepts, Duncan makes a move, and Duncan and Bella run off together. 

Excess ensues on their escapade; Bella learns the joys of exploring her sexuality through many successive sessions with Duncan, flirting with men on the town, and even a stint as a sex worker. Although it feels that the sexual awakening is the core of the film's focus, Bella also just grows up: she starts using full sentences and paragraphs, asking questions about and understanding more complex facets of life, and engaging in a more mature way with the world around her. She learns about poverty while on a luxury cruise, experiences the death of someone close to her, and ends up in a variety of relationships both good and bad. 

Throughout the hectic plot, Emma Stone is terrific as Bella. It's a really tough role — both historical and ahistorical, both feminist and infantilizing, both empowered and used — and she aces the execution. So, too, does Willem Dafoe continue to never miss; he takes what could have been a boring Dr. Frankenstein character and transforms him into a quirky, odd, parental figure, complete with a comically dark childhood as the victim of his own father. Both are supported by Tony McNamara's strong dialogue for them, adapting the late Scottish author Alasdair Gray's book of the same name. 

Unfortunately, both Stone and Dafoe outshine everyone else in spades. Mark Ruffalo is particularly and completely in over his head as Duncan, a role that's increasingly annoying and repetitive as the film goes on, and which Ruffalo's shlubby everyman persona does no favors. (Really, I don't think I've ever loved him in anything besides Spotlight.) His sputtered slurs take so much screentime it's exhausting. Ramy Youssef plays the same lovable but grating role as he takes in his eponymous Hulu show, Christopher Abbot is shoehorned in an awkward final act that paints him as a tiresome one-dimensional baddie, Kathryn Hunter is talented but doesn't have much time to make a mark, and Jerrod Carmichael and Hanna Schygulla are dull as cruise passengers. 

The shortcomings of the supporting cast are a reflection of a script that doesn't quite get beyond its thesis. We start out the movie with a male doctor callously creating an adult female infant who, because of her adult beauty and childlike intelligence, men want to have sex with — as an audience, we get it, men are base and bad — but then Lanthimos never really pushes us beyond that, as Ruffalo and Youssef and others all repeat the same interactions over and over. And while Bella certainly grows from this experience in the world, moments of thoughtfulness or kindness (such as a favorite scene where she shares a joke with a male customer) are vastly outnumbered by threatened genital mutilation or screams of vile gendered expletives. 

A finale marked by Bella's agency and claiming to celebrate her relationship with other women (including a never-really-fleshed-out lover and a fellow science experiment) does so without much nuance or interest, particularly after a painfully black-and-white run-in with a past husband. Ultimately, Lanthimos feels like he's just revisiting some pet favorite themes (like being shut-ins, experimenting sexually, or redefining language) from past films including Dogtooth and The Favourite without moving them forward. 

Stylistically, Poor Things is certainly unique. CGI skies and oceans evoke the comic-book worlds of graphic novels or Zack Snyder's 300; costumes are a mélange of Victorian, steampunk, and child's garage sale; makeup and hair add a level of style to Ruffalo or Youssef or mark Hunter's body with bold circus-spectacle tattoos; set design creates buildings, ships, and parks that feel both grounded in reality and fantastical at the same time. All create an interesting world and nicely coalesce with the plot's reliance on scientific advancement and experimentation, but most are ultimately never memorable enough to elevate the movie. The same is true for intertitles with the same scraggly typeface as the movie's poster; nice to look at, but not enough to add much to the film. A couple visual components, like the big puffy sleeves on Stone's dresses or Dafoe's gross facial disfigurations, do end up being standouts, though, as does Jerskin Fendrix's score.

Although it's always fun to see directors really commit to representing sex and sexuality on the silver screen, and Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe further cementing their positions as all-time great actors, Poor Things fails to do much more.