Poor Things
For several decades in British literature there has flourished a genre that borrows the settings and narrative conventions of the Victorian novel while modernizing it with all the sex, violence, and other improprieties that were off-limits in the famously prudish Victorian era. The film industry, despite its frequent and tedious revisitations of the original Victorians, has largely ignored this genre. 269
So in a sense Poor Things feels overdue, and its occasional overexcitedness at its own irreverence is excusable on the grounds that it’s more or less the first movie to embrace the horny “what if Jane Eyre fucked” spirit that English novelists have been working with since the ‘80s (if not earlier). Plus, when did <PERSON> take a funny pill? His comic turn as a louche cuck is a pleasant surprise, as is the film’s rather moving story of self-determination. If this has haters, they’re trying too hard. 585