Overview: From filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and producer Emma Stone comes the incredible tale and fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter (Stone), a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe).

Under Baxter’s protection, Bella is eager to learn. Hungry for the worldliness she is lacking, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a slick and debauched lawyer, on a whirlwind adventure across the continents.

Free from the prejudices of her times, Bella grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.

Verdict: Adapted from Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, Poor Things is essentially a reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, wherein the resurrected corpse is that of a woman (Stone) who died by suicide, her body a perfect vessel for the curiosity of mad scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe).

Much to his surprise, this beguiling girl he dubs Bella Baxter becomes more than an experiment to him; she becomes a daughter of sorts. Theirs is a bond forged by science but blossoming in sincere mutual adoration. However, Bella is growing up fast. Though she has the body of an adult, her mind begins as that of a child. As such, she is full of extraordinary potential and hungry for both knowledge and experience.

More swiftly than her father would like, she begins to yearn for what lies beyond the humdrum confines of the Baxter home, which is literally shot in black and white. When a lusty rogue (Mark Ruffalo, absolutely sublime in his sleaziness) offers to show her the wider world, she jumps at the chance — and all the curious opportunities that follow.

As Bella sets forth, her world bursts into color. On their voyages, she finds cities of aqua and gold, with pink skies and lush greenery. Bella herself is oft bedecked in sickly pale blues and vivid but slightly nauseating yellows. And that’s a virtue, not a glitch.

Through this lens, Poor Things becomes a coming-of-age story that radiantly reflects a young woman growing to understand herself as a creature of intelligence, sexual desire, and autonomy. While the origin of the film is the birth of horror itself, Lanthimos’s Poor Things has a lovely aesthetic that pulls its pastels from surprisingly grim sources.

At the film’s press screening at the New York Film Festival, production designers Shona Heath and James Price and costume designer Holly Waddington revealed that their color choices were plucked from anatomy books, reflecting the hues of veins, blood, and bile. This might sound repulsive on the page, but in execution it is glorious — while still feeling a wee bit gross.

When the Poor Things designers explained their inspiration, a puzzle piece of the film clicked into place for me. Life and death are intricately intertwined in the film, just as the repulsive colors of the body’s innards are to Bella’s widening world. Coolly, Lanthimos leaps from Bella’s galavanting back to lonely Godwin’s dissection exhibitions. Both are experimenting — one in life lessons, the other on corpses.