Steph Green at Inverse writes:
In Victorian London (but not as we know it), the physically deformed scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) has lovingly — if irresponsibly — saved the life of a young woman who jumped off a bridge by transplanting the brain of her unborn baby into her own head and re-animating her (yep). He christens her Bella (Emma Stone) and sets to work accelerating her mental development to match her body with the help of Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), a budding surgeon who comes to love this gleefully unfettered woman-child. Finding herself to be “a flawed, experimenting person” who is into masturbating in a big way, Bella decides that before she is married off to a life of relative imprisonment with Max and her father, she must see and explore the world, setting off for a sexual odyssey with debauched lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, never more hysterically funny than this).
Holy shit. Sign me up. Full disclosure, I absolutely hated The Lobster. But, I will always give Lanthimos the benefit of the doubt. His films are hard to love for obvious reasons, most notably, his cold and cruel worlds are full of stoicism and absurdity that is just relentless. However, Poor Things appears to have some levity and stylistic frivolity unseen in his previous works (I mean Dogtooth was just so unbelievably bleak). So, I’m a little excited for this one.