We asked cultural commentators for their verdicts. Warning: contains spoilers. I wanted to enjoy Poor Things. Emma Stone is a terrific actor, Mark Ruffalo a genuine good guy activist playing a cad.
As a work of fiction, Poor Things can explore anything it likes, but it is not feminist. Just because a woman chooses to do something, does not make the act feminist.
Prostitution has always been romanticised by men in fiction, but it remains overwhelmingly the male exploitation of poor female bodies. She is bound and gagged in a scene played for laughs. A man forces his young sons to watch him have sex with Bella. No, I do not think that I will be basing my feminist manifesto on this film any time soon. I might as well think of Medea, the magnificent character of Greek myth who kills her own children, as charting a practical path to power.
Its relationship with realism is pretty heavily signalled from the off โ as in, a distant one. You have never seen a person like Bella Baxter. You have also never seen a living creature composed of half a goose and half a dog.
Like the story of Medea, though, it brings something rich that is nothing to do with its surface mechanics. In Bella, the film offers a vision of a sexually free woman who fearlessly, without guilt, without negative consequences, quenches her appetites, utterly unconscious of Judaeo-Christian or patriarchal shame.
