As a woman, I always pause and brace myself for times when men are going to give a two-hour cinematic treatise on female sexuality. Add to the mental morass that none of these men have degrees in psychology, women’s studies or human sexuality, and you can be sure there will be mental damage. “Poor Things” as a film is poorly done feminism.

The author of the book, Alasdair James Gray (28 December 1934-19 December 2019), is dead. The fictional autobiography  “Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer” was published in 1992. I haven’t read the book, but keep in mind that Gray was  60 when it was published and that he went to art school for a degree in Design and Mural Painting. I also went to art school and I write, but I am a woman.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos, 50, studied business administration and played basketball before studying film and television directing. Screenwriter Tony McNamara is an Australian playwright in his late 50s with an education in writing.

Director Lanthimos uses the same cinematographer from his 2018 Golden Globe and Academy Award nominated “The Favourite,” a historical black comedy about the relationship between cousins Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz) and Abigail Masham (Emma Stone) as they compete to be the court favorite of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) in the 1700s. Colman won both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award (Best Actress). That screenplay was also written by McNamara with Deborah Davis. Davis has submitted the story to producer Ceci Dempsey and Ed Guiney who brought in Lanthimos. Lanthimos introduced David to McNamara who helped rework the script.

“The Favourite” was rated R so it will be no surprise that “Poor Things” is also rated R “for strong and pervasive sexual content, graphic nudity, disturbing material, gore and language.”

The film begins with a woman in a fine silk blue dress with armadillo-like mutton chop sleeves taking a dive off of a bridge.

Then the film goes to black-and-white. A young childish woman in a white dress with huge mutton-chop sleeves is in a large and grand Victorian house with an older, much scarred man. The older man, “a monster” or “an extraordinary surgeon,” is a doctor and an instructor, Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). He lives in a large home with his maid/housekeeper Mrs. Prim (Vicki Pepperine) and this child-like woman named Bella. In this alternative universe Victorian era, Godwin selects a student from the medical classes he teaches at the institute founded by his father.

He tells the student, Max McCandles (Samy Youssef), that his recent paper, “It showed signs of a conventional mind straining hard to almost touch mediocrity.” That’s praise so faint you’d need a microscope to read it.

McCandles meets Bella Baxter. Godwin explains, “Her mental age and her body are not quite synchronized.”

Bella (Emma Stone) was the woman who committed suicide, but Baxter took the brain of her unborn fetus to replace hers. She is not Godwin’s only experiment. In his expansive mansion, there are plenty of animals  constructed from a mix of parts: a dog with a duck’s head, a French bulldog’s head on a duck and a goat with a duck’s head.

McCandles has been brought in to observe Bella and her rapid development as her brain attempts to catch up with her body. There are other signs of this rapid growth. McCandles reports her long black hair grows one inch every day.

Godwin cannot have sexual relations, likely from experiments his now dead demented father performed on him. In addition, he feels nothing but paternal instincts for Bella. With Godwin, this is paternalism in its most benign form. Bella will experience other versions of paternalism that are distorted and even demented and demeaning. Yet Godwin consents to McCandles marrying Bella, but  requires that Bella stay at his house. To draw up the contract with this stipulation, he brings a lawyer into the house. The lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo),  is the villain of this film, but he brings about the second sexual awakening of Bella.

Her first sexual experience is through masturbation. “Bella discover happy when she want!” she exclaims. Of course, one can’t be masturbating in front of everyone but Bella doesn’t know that. Mrs. Prim attempts to warn Bella about this lawyer, as Bella later relates to Wedderburn, “Mrs. Prim said you were wolf with scent of hundred women on you.”

Wedderburn is only amused, “She undersells it.”

As Bella runs away with the lawyer to Lisbon, their world bursts into color and audiences get soft pornographic images that are meant to please the male gaze.

Bella wonders, “Why do not people just to this all the time?”

Wedderburn explains, “Well, at the risk of being immodest, you’ve just been thrice fucked by the very best. It’s probable that no other man would ever bring you to the raptures I have.”

Bella exclaims, “Then it will just be you that I do furious jumping with?”

Yet like all men, Wedderburn has his limitations. Bella asks, “Again?”

But Wedderburn gives her the sad news, “Unfortunately, even I have my limits. Men cannot just keep coming back for more.”

Bella asks, “It is a physiological problem, a weakness in men?

Wedderburn admits, “Well, perhaps so.” He also adds, “I have very little to offer in the way on constancy, just adventure.”

In an imaginary Lisbon, they engage in hedonistic sex without the worry of pregnancy (even though we know that Bella had been pregnant and I don’t think it was established that she could not get pregnant again) or disease or the menstrual cycle.  If Wedderburn has been so promiscuous one would wonder why he doesn’t have some disease or a legion of children out of wedlock. Maybe he has a secret contraceptive device, but there’s no talk of contraceptive balloons and messy withdrawals or weird inserted concoctions or bitter herbal remedies.

When Bella begins reaching out into the world, Wedderburn takes her on a cruise to restrict her contacts. Yet on the ship,  she meets the older woman Martha Von Kurtzroc (Hanna Schygulla) and her younger companion Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael) who attempt to introduce her to books. Harry’s cruel jest, Wedderburn’s jealousy, and the greed of others  cause Bella’s naive generosity to bring financial ruin to the Bella and Wedderburn. Forced off the cruise, they eventually get to Paris, but to earn money, Bella begins to work at a brothel.  There she learns about economics from the grim Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter) and Bella makes friends with fellow prostitute Toinette (Suzy Bemba) who teaches about socialism.

Bella will eventually make her way back to her “God”  and Max, and her past will be revealed. We’ll know exactly why she, as Victoria Blessington, chose suicide and we’ll meet the father of that child whose brain is now Bella’s.

If you’re a heterosexual woman or gay man, the cinematic framing is not for us. I doubt if the director Lanthimos or his cinematographer Robbie Ryan (“The Favourite”) or the screenwriter McNamara asked themselves what images conjure up the sexual awakening of heterosexual girls and women or even gay men. In the 2020s, the theatrical and cinematic worlds are seen changes since Queen Victoria ruled. This is an age where we have Chippendales dancers (from 1979), “Magic Mike” (2012) and “Naked Boys Singing” (premiered in 1998) and Puppetry of the Penis (premiered 1996). Women like looking and there are plenty of thirst traps on TikTok to prove that point.

The naked breasts and the orgasm face of a woman seems more like traditional pornographic images meant to excite and entertain heterosexual men. Heterosexual women are then asked to view themselves as an object viewed, not the viewer. Are women supposed to think: “Is that how I look” or “I should look like that”? This film then isn’t really about the sexual awakening of a girl as she becomes a woman. We don’t see Bella wondering, “Why does that  muscular thigh (or other physical part of a man), make me feel this way?”  As such,  it really isn’t made with most women in mind.

Further, for an intellectual being that Bella will become, did any of the men involved ask themselves: What excites the minds of young girls and women? In the actual Victorian era (63 years from 1837 to 1901, there were gentle scientists. Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) who made scientific illustrations and observations in mycology. Mary Anning (1799-1847) who was an avid fossil collect and dealer who made discoveries in the fossil beds along the English Channel at Lyme Regis. Most famously, there was Marie Curie (1867-1934).

To a degree, the film seems like the old ploy where men try to convince women not to be uptight, to be cool and that all a thousand years of puritanical patriarchal or Victorian mores are preventing them from being sex-positive and sexually promiscuous.

Emma Stone’s performance is fearless and no doubt will be prominently featured on sites devoted to the nudity of actresses. Her physical depiction of the progression of Bella Baxter’s movement to reflect her mental age is amusing and performative, considering that the clothes she begins wearing–short culottes and often a transparent long skirt, only vaguely relate to the Victorian era.

Dafoe’s “God” Baxter is a wounded but brilliant soul whose misadventures under his father’s experimental surgical hands forces him to wear his history of victimization on his face for the world to see. With Dafoe’s textured performance, I’d be more interested in learning about his Godwin Baxter’s life journey.

The film scores well with diversity although all the leads (Stone, Dafoe and Ruffalo) are White. Youssef is Egyptian American and was raised Muslim. Both Ruffalo and Abbott have Italian ancestry and Ruffalo attended Catholic schools. Pepperdine, Hunter and Schygulla are older women.  Bemba and Carmichael are Black.

The “Poor Things” steampunk Victorian world is well-constructed and delightful, but one wishes there was a better story for it. In addition to the black-and-white versus color scheme, the cinematographer uses vignetting and different lenses to give a feeling of a world off kilter and sometimes adds to the voyeuristic feel. There is beauty in the language used to both indicate the delicacy of the Victorian era and Bella’s struggle to explain things she doesn’t understand with a limited vocabulary, little social experience and no filter (except when it comes to menses and painful intercourse).

Although Bella/Victoria tells her husband, “I have found our time together interesting but have ascertained why I jumped from a bridge. I wish to see my near dead God(win).”

Her husband replies, “Adorable idea, but unfortunately,  my darling, my life is dedicated to the taking of territory. You are mine and that’s the long and short of it.”

Although Bella/Victoria protests, “I’m not territory.”

Her husband man-splains, “The root of the problem is between your legs. I will have it off and it will not distract and divert you anymore. See a man spends his life wrangling his sexual compulsions.  It’s a curse and yet, in some ways, his life’s work. A woman’s life work is children.” He then adds, “I intend to rid you of that infernal packet between your legs and plant a seed in you straight after.”

Yet the clever language use and the steampunk fantasy land do not make up for the crimes against feminism. “Poor Things” is a poor depiction of feminism and a twisted version of female empowerment. It is intellectualized cinematic man-splaining.

“Poor Things” premiered at the 80th Venice International Film Festival on 1 September 2023 where it won the Golden Lion. It was released in the US on 8 December 2023.