Yorgos Lanthimos’s follow-up to “The Favourite” is wilder, weirder, and even more ambitious than its predecessor.
, an equally wacky period piece adapted from Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, led by one of the stars of his previous hit, Emma Stone, and penned by one of its writers, Tony McNamara. Does it live up to expectations? In short, yes, but it’s also wilder, weirder, and more ambitious than its predecessor—a film which breaks boundaries and subverts our assumptions with as much joy and recklessness as its wide-eyed heroine.
She is Bella Baxter, played with childlike delight by Stone, in what is almost definitely her strangest and also perhaps her best performance to date. When we first meet her, she’s the rebellious charge of Willem Dafoe’s Dr. Godwin Baxter, a pioneering Victorian surgeon who, we soon learn, discovered her dead, pregnant body in the Thames, delivered her child, who miraculously survived, transplanted its brain into her skull, and revived her.
Yet, the film never lets its glorious style overshadow its substance, and much of that is down to Stone’s unfailing commitment to her performance: alongside a rogues’ gallery of mad scientists, libertines, and snooty intellectuals, she—as odd as it sounds—feels the most grounded and real. Her Bella is endlessly curious and enthusiastic, leaping from one newly developed passion to another with the eagerness of a seven-year-old.
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