I recently had the displeasure of seeing Poor Things in theaters. Buying my ticket late in a packed house, the only available seat was in the front row, where I was looking directly up at the screen. Neck pain and viewing angle aside, I still didn’t enjoy this movie. The story was odd, and the characters had few redeeming qualities if any. But it’ll get Oscars attention because it’s quirky and set in some Wes Anderson-meets-steampunk version of turn-of-the-century Europe. I’ll quickly go through the plot and give my analysis on the characters and themes of the movie.

The story starts with Bella Baxter, an experimental subject of Godwin “God” Baxter, a prominent surgeon. Get it? “God” is the creator of Bella. How clever is that? Godwin recruits McCandles to collect data on Bella’s improvement. The first thing McCandles says upon seeing Bella is “What a pretty retard,” which essentially sums up the plot of the movie. Everyone wants to fuck a developmentally disabled woman and the audience is supposed to feel empowered by this or something. Bella starts “discovering her body” and sexually assaults the housekeeper to the amusement of the audience. I guess “grabbing her by the pussy” is funny now when a woman does it. Anyway, we discover that Bella was previously a pregnant woman who jumped off a bridge (women be crazy, am I right, fellas?). Baxter discovers her freshly-dead body, extracts the fetus, and implants its brain into Bella’s cranium. After about three days of watching her, McCandles falls in love with Bella and wants to marry her. Mark Ruffalo’s sleazy lawyer Duncan drafts a marriage contract which requires Bella and McCandles to continue to live at Baxter’s house under his supervision.

Sleazy lawyer Duncan immediately falls in love with Bella too and asks her to travel through Europe with him. Baxter reluctantly allows it, and McCandles can only watch as Bella goes off to pre-cuck him with Ruffalo. Duncan and Bella fuck a lot and argue a lot, which is probably the most realistic aspect of the movie. At one point she gets drunk and becomes double retarded. He takes her on a cuise, where she meets people, wants to help dying babies, and steals Duncan’s money. Once they get kicked off the ship for insufficient funds, they wind up in Paris, cold, starving, and broke.

But not to worry. Bella quickly uses her resourcefulness to discover prostitution. Becoming a crowd favorite at the brothel, she advocates for workers’ rights and socialism with her new pals. Duncan hates that she’s become a prostitute and goes mad, harassing her to come back to him. Then somehow McCandles reaches out to Bella under the guise of Baxter’s deteriorating health in order to bring her back to London. As Bella and McCandles walk along the river bank, he states that he does not mind that she’s been a whore as long as she gets checked for diseases, and he would like to continue with their planned marriage. Baxter takes enough heroin, amphetamines, and cocaine to walk her down the aisle of the church. Then they get married and live happily ever after as the curtains close.

Just kidding. We have at least a half hour left. Duncan arrives with a mystery man just in time before the marriage is official. Mystery man is Blessington, Bella’s first husband when she was named Victoria in her past life before she discovered dirt on the Clintons and tragically had to push herself off that bridge. Blessington demands that she go with him, and she agrees against everyone’s better judgment. Immediately becoming Blessington’s prisoner, she learns that she and her husband were bad people in her past life. So she throws a chloroform martini in his face, shoots hit foot, and drags his body back to London, where a goat brain is implanted into his skull for shits and giggles. Baxter dies, and Bella decides she wants to be a surgeon. Also there are her prostitute friend and cunnilingus partner as well as Felicity, Baxter’s replacement experiment for Bella while she was away. Now they live happily ever.

Let’s get into the main characters. Or at least those worth mentioning. Starting with Bella, the adult body with a fetus brain. Even though the movie is nearly two and a half hours, her character arc is a bit rushed and disjointed. Living in London under Baxter’s watch, she was clumsy and could barely put a sentence together, often misconjugating verbs and making up her own terms for novel experiences. Yet once she embarks on her journey with Duncan, she is eloquent, articulate, philosophical, inquisitive, and competent. She becomes too competent, “OP” as the anime dorks would call it, quickly turning into the smartest and most rational and thoughtful person in the whole movie in a matter of days. While employed as a prostitute, she observes surgical demonstrations for funsies and comments on the “shoddy work,” even though the extent of her lab experience consists of smashing equipment and being off in her own world while the surgical knowledge somehow osmoses through her skull. But she’s a science expert now, and lord knows I trust the science and the experts.

Ruffalo plays Duncan with a weird pompous cockney accent that is very distracting. I would say the accent is also detracting, but there is no substance or character from which to detract. The annoyingness of the accent is only matched by the annoyingness of his ego. After fucking during a siesta, Bella asks him why people don’t just have sex all the time. His response was “Well, you’ve just been fucked thrice by the very best,” and explains that other people are much worse at sex than him. Once Bella starts to outgrow him, steals his money, and becomes a hooker, he turns into a whiny little pussy brat who just mopes and yells the whole time until he is institutionalized. I guess Mark Ruffalo did a good job of playing a character we’re supposed to hate, but good god he let himself go. His chins gave their worst performance yet.

On to McCandles, there’s not much I can say here. He essentially disappears from the second act, and he’s pretty much a soyboy beta cuck the whole time. Falling in love with a baby immediately, then letting another man take her through a sexual journey of Europe, gleefully accepting her back after learning she turned tricks to make ends meet, and then letting her ex-husband just take her away to imprison her. But he wins her back in the end along with whatever diseases she carries.

Willem Dafoe puts in a good performance as Godwin Baxter, who is maybe the only redeemable character in the movie. Abused and experimented on as a child, he pushes the boundaries of scientific study. Okay sure, he did remove a fetus from a dead woman and implant the fetus brain into the mother’s head instead of just rescuing the baby, but at least he cared for Bella and didn’t try to fuck her. Turns out he’s a eunuch and couldn’t fuck her even if he tried, but he became a father figure to Bella. Cut the man some slack.

The last character I will mention is Jerrod Carmichael’s Harry, whom Bella met on the cruise. I give Carmichael credit for not even attempting an accent in this movie. He plays a small role where he waxes philosophical with Bella and tells her not to help dying babies because the locals will rape, rob, and kill her. He really only serves the purpose of telling the audience that some people are good and some people are bad. He also may want to fuck Bella, but he’s fucking some old white hag instead.

Poor Things was meant to be humorous. There were a few funny moments, but most of the “humor” was in the form of lines delivered by Bella in one of two formats. In the first half of the film, when Bella is still learning words and manners, she makes up goofy terms for things or ruins a subtle joke by blatantly explaining it. She calls masturbation “make happy myself” and calls sex “furious jumping,” which is repeated often throughout the movie and is never funny. When Bella and Duncan meet up with friends, she spits out her food and asks “Why should I keep it in my mouth if it is revolting?” To which the other woman replies “I feel the same way about Gerald.” Okay, good setup and jab at her husband, no need to go further. But then Bella says “Oh you mean his penis. Duncan’s is a bit salty sometimes.” The audience roars and I sit silently. I’m too lazy and uncreative to write a movie, and even I know that is lazy and uncreative writing. The other form of humor comes later in the story when Bella is more articulate. Her “punchlines” are just explaining simple things or expressing simple thoughts and emotions using big words, quick cadence, and convoluted sentences in a British accent. And Americans just eat it up because they think it’s funny and quirky. Hey writers and Americans, it’s not.

I don’t really know what the theme of the movie is. Something about being a girlboss and overcoming obstacles maybe. Or it’s that you can be a whore with a literal baby brain, and men everywhere will still fall in love with you as long as you’re hot. Or it’s that experimental medical breakthroughs should be properly tested for years to determine long-term effects before being sent off into the real world. Or it’s about family and love and forgiveness. Whatever the message is, we are approaching a singularity of Hollywood pedophilia. We’ve normalized the sexualization of a teen’s brain in an adult’s body in Big and 13 Going on 30, and now it’s an infant’s brain. We’ve also normalized the sexualization of an adult’s brain in a child’s body in movies like Interview with the Vampire and Orphan. We’re so close to the tipping point. It’s just a matter of time before we cross the bridge to child’s brain in a child’s body, and there’s no backsies on that. Tread lightly, Hollywood. And stop fucking the kids.