Poor Things - Alasdair Gray (2024)

FAQs

Why did God burp bubbles in Poor Things? ›

Now, there is at least something grotesque about him—because his innards were also experimented on, he can't properly digest and needs a contraption to expel nearly solid burp bubbles whenever he eats.

The film challenges society's insistence that a woman's value lies in motherhood. It urges viewers to reconsider and expand their views on female identity. It highlights women's diverse aspirations and choices beyond traditional roles. Poor Things is not just a tale from the past.

Godwin Baxter's (Willem Dafoe) latest experiment is reanimating a woman's corpse by using an infant brain for a brand-new person he's coined Bella (Stone). While Bella mentally develops from ages 2 to 20 with the body of a 30-year-old at rapid speed, she catches the attention of four different men.

Costume designer Holly Waddington deserves awards for her work, and the production designers have created a colorful, fantastical setting for Bella's adventures. While this movie is definitely not for kids, it's ideal for prestige-film-loving older teens and adults.

Poor Things is ableist because of its use of prosthetics to simulate facial differences and its explicit comparison of Bella Baxter, who has a baby's brain and an adult's body, to people with intellectual disabilities. Many other disabled people, including Erica Mones and Andrew Gurza, also criticized its ableism.

The madame of a brothel, Swiney reveals herself a predator who is hot for Bella, biting Bella's earlobes when the desire gets to be too much, returning to her controlling position. During her time with Duncan, and now in the brothel, Bella's awakening (both sexual and intellectual) explodes.

Bella is going to face lots of different men who want to control her in different ways. And by the end of the story, just like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, she's going to go back to “no place like home.” She is going to go back to God. God is dying. Bella returns, but she does not return the same woman.

Seen through that lens, Poor Things's central premise functions as a metaphor for neurodivergence in general and autism in particular, with Bella's adventures resonating with the all too rarely depicted experience of being an autistic woman. Autistic people often identify with aliens, androids, and outsiders.

Called “God” by Bella, Godwin bears grotesque scars on his face and body resulting from his childhood experience as the subject of his father's deranged scientific curiosity – an experience that failed to stymie his own rather baroque quest for empirical facts.

Content warning: the film depicts scenes of blood, interior organs, dead corpses, graphic surgery, suicide, sexual assault, prostitution and nudity. The film “Poor Things” got some of the most mixed reviews that I have ever seen, making it arguably one of the most impactful films of the year.

Is "Poor Things" based on a true story? ›

“There is no right or wrong to this, (because) it's shockingly not based on a true story, and she's not a real person." Willem Dafoe plays the doctor who “created” Bella, and said people are wrong if they imagine him to be a mad scientist. “I get upset when I hear someone call him a mad scientist.

At one point, Godwin explains that he has to make his own gastric juices because his father took out his oxyntic and pyloric glands. Max McCandles, his protégé and Bella's eventual husband, asks, “Why in God's name would he do that?” Godwin responds drily, “To discover what no one knew. Turns out we need them.

A trigger warning is also needed as there is talk of sexual abuse. The story begins with Bella Baxter — played by Emma Stone — stumbling through a large mansion owned by her father figure, Godwin, played by Willem Dafoe.

'Ultimately, she is a woman born into financial privilege'

Instead, she focuses only on her pleasure. While shagging her way round Europe, she escapes men who wish to control her – another win for the “Poor Things is feminist” school of thought.

Bella leaves Max at the altar despite agreeing to marry him and leaves him to go with Blessington, but even after escaping from Alfie, Poor Things never confirms if Bella married Max after returning home or not. The film's ending sees the pair in good spirits and there doesn't seem to be any ill will between them.

The audience learns that Dr. Godwin Baxter cannot properly burp due to his father making that bodily function impossible in an experiment. So, he must use gas chambers to pump air/gas into his body to “burp” out a dishwater colored bubble that often pops over others in the room with the doctor.

Part of this is because he, too, was mutilated by his surgeon father (in one of the oddest visuals you'll ever see, he lost the ability to make digestive acids, so a machine creates large bubbles of gas that he “burps” out during meals to keep his metabolic processes going), which extends to a series of Dr.

Chewing gum and sucking on hard candy make it more likely that a person will swallow air, while fizzy drinks release carbon dioxide in the form of bubbles, which a person then burps out. The NIDDK also note that eating or drinking quickly can make a person swallow more air than they otherwise would.

God is the product of horrific experiments that his father performed upon him. Unlike Bella, he bears the scars of his history on his face and has spent his whole life trying to rationalize them. Bella, on the other hand, bears none of the scars of her history. She is coming at the world with fresh eyes.