Poor Things (2023) review

After taking her own life by leaping off a bridge, the corpse of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) is nabbed by kooky Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) who "revives" her by swapping her brain out with that of a child's, she's "retrained" in how to speak and behave by young physician Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) and they get engaged ... but self-confident Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) pops in, steals her and the two go traveling together (to Portugal, Greece etc.) so he can teach her "worldly things" (they also have frantic "jumping sessions").  Considering Dafoe's gruesome patchwork makeup and the theme of "reanimation" it's clear Shelley's Frankenstein is a starting point, but it has more of a cheeky feminist twist to it: Bella's a literal wild child who cannot be contained, voraciously consumes literature (and philosophy), naïvely gives away money and then turns to prostitution for cash and pleasure ... which literally drives Duncan to the mad house.  The painted sets and costumes are vibrant and it has a fairy tale-like appearance (although I do think Lanthimos overuses the fisheye lens), and the performances are uniformly solid: Stone's transformation from happily urinating on the floor to becoming a "proper" (if outspoken) lady is plausible, and while I never associate Ruffalo with comedy, he's downright hilarious.  It does somewhat start to fracture the longer it's allowed to carry on, however: I understand the warning against attempting to "control" women, but when her actual ex-husband Alfie (Christopher Abbott) reappears to locks her up in his castle (with plans to castrate her) and she goes back (once again) to Max, it's trying its darndest to placate its female viewers and dividing men into three categories: impotent father-figures, brutes and cuckolds who should be tolerant of being cheated on and abandoned ... repeatedly.