Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things begins as a tale of impossible resurrection. Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone, has the body of an adult woman and, initially, the mind of a child. The surgeon Godwin Baxter has recovered the body of Victoria Blessington after her suicide and implanted in it the brain of the fetus she was carrying. Bella is thus neither simply reborn nor restored. She is manufactured: a living experiment assembled through an act of scientific authority.

The film, adapted by Tony McNamara from Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, has often been described as a feminist reworking of Frankenstein. Bella’s journey takes her from Godwin’s London home into a larger world of travel, sex, money, philosophy, exploitation, and political inequality. Her refusal of Victorian decorum is exhilarating, and the film repeatedly invites us to understand her appetite—for knowledge, pleasure, and experience—as a force of emancipation.

Yet emancipation is not the whole story. Poor Things is also a narrative about bodies made available to institutions, experts, husbands, markets, and norms. Read through Michel Foucault’s account of biopolitics, Bella’s story appears less like a clean escape from power than a movement between different regimes of power. Her resistance is real, but so is the capacity of power to reorganize itself around that resistance. By the end, she seems to have won. The more difficult question is what, exactly, her victory reproduces.

The Greek Weird Wave and a Cinema of Biopolitics

Lanthimos is closely associated with the Greek Weird Wave, a loose cinematic formation that emerged with particular force around the years of Greece’s sovereign-debt crisis. Films such as Dogtooth and Alps use deadpan performance, grotesque bodily rituals, distorted families, and strangely regulated spaces to unsettle familiar social categories. Their worlds feel absurd, but the absurdity is systematic: language, intimacy, kinship, work, and authority are reorganized into rules whose arbitrariness becomes impossible to ignore.

The political context matters. Austerity policies imposed after the 2008 financial crisis brought unemployment, shrinking public services, and severe pressure on the Greek middle class. Greece was also subjected to a disciplinary gaze from European institutions and dominant member states, which frequently cast the country as a population requiring correction, supervision, and reform. The crisis was therefore not only economic. It was a struggle over whose lives would be administered, which forms of hardship would be normalized, and who had the authority to define responsible conduct.

In Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics, Dimitris Papanikolaou connects this cinematic language to the management of life under crisis. Although Poor Things is an English-language international production set in an imagined Victorian world, it retains this preoccupation. Its extravagant sets and comic distortions do not remove the film from politics; they make the mechanisms of social order newly visible. Bodies are examined, modified, educated, sexualized, exchanged, confined, and ultimately trained to govern themselves.

From Sovereign Power to Biopolitics

Foucault’s account of modern power helps clarify what is at stake. Power, for him, is not a possession held exclusively by a ruler, a government, or a social class. It circulates through institutions, practices, expert knowledge, social expectations, intimate relationships, and the ways individuals understand themselves. It is not only prohibitive. It is productive: it creates categories, identities, norms, capacities, and desires.

Foucault describes a historical shift from sovereign power—the right to “take life or let live”—toward forms of power concerned with fostering, regulating, and optimizing life. Modern states count populations, classify illness, organize schools and prisons, regulate sexuality, and turn health, fertility, heredity, and productivity into political problems. The body becomes an object of knowledge and investment. It is to be trained, corrected, improved, and made useful.

This transformation brought genuine advances in medicine and life expectancy. It also enabled racial classification, eugenic projects, and increasingly sophisticated forms of normalization. The point is not that care is secretly identical to violence. It is that the authority to care, cure, and improve can also become the authority to decide what a proper life and a proper body should be.

Sexuality is crucial to this process. Foucault challenges the familiar “repressive hypothesis,” according to which Victorian society simply silenced sex. Modern power did not merely prohibit sexuality; it produced an expanding apparatus for speaking about, studying, diagnosing, and classifying it. Medicine, psychiatry, law, education, and the family made sexuality an object of truth. Individuals were encouraged to recognize themselves through sexual identities and to regulate their conduct accordingly.

Poor Things stages this productive power through two connected authorities. The first is Victorian patriarchy, which imagines women as domestic, dependent, sexually passive, and naturally subordinate. The second is Godwin’s scientific positivism, which treats life as material available for experiment. Bella’s resurrection delivers her from one order only by placing her inside another.

Bella as a Biopolitical Experiment

Before Bella, there was Victoria Blessington: a pregnant woman trapped in a violent marriage to General Alfie Blessington. Her suicide can be read as a desperate refusal of the life allocated to her. Yet even death does not remove her body from power. Godwin retrieves it, opens it, alters it, and returns it to life under a new name.

Godwin explains his procedure as an act of benevolence. Victoria, he reasons, had rejected life, while her unborn child had not been given the opportunity to choose it. His experiment appears to offer both of them another chance. But this justification reveals the structure of biopolitical authority: Godwin decides what counts as life, whose wishes matter, which body belongs to whom, and what intervention can be called care. Bella is simultaneously daughter, patient, research subject, and property.

Godwin is himself the product of such power. His father subjected him to brutal experiments in the name of science, leaving his body permanently scarred and sexually mutilated. Scientific violence reproduces itself across generations, not because Godwin is simply evil, but because he has learned to understand domination as knowledge and injury as progress. His affectionate relationship with Bella does not cancel this history. Care and control coexist.

Bella’s rapid development makes this tension visible. Godwin records her vocabulary, movements, appetites, and cognitive growth. Max McCandles observes her on his behalf. The men around her treat her development as a measurable process, while the possibility of marriage is introduced before she can meaningfully understand its implications. Her supposedly protected home is also a laboratory and a training ground.

Foucault’s insight is useful here: modern power is most effective when it no longer needs to issue commands continuously. It constructs the field within which subjects act, teaches them what is normal, and encourages them to monitor themselves. Bella’s escape from Godwin’s house with Duncan Wedderburn therefore disrupts one apparatus of control. It does not carry her outside power altogether.

Sexuality as Resistance

Bella’s discovery of sexual pleasure is one of the film’s central forms of resistance. She refuses shame, monogamous entitlement, and the assumption that female desire must remain subordinate to male judgment. Duncan initially imagines himself as the sophisticated libertine who will introduce an innocent woman to the world. He soon discovers that Bella’s autonomy exceeds the fantasy he constructed. Her pleasure belongs neither to him nor to the moral order he pretends to defy.

This reversal matters because Victorian gender ideology separated the rational, public man from the passive, domestic woman. Bella refuses that division. She is curious about her body, but also about language, suffering, philosophy, and social inequality. Experience expands rather than diminishes her capacity to think. Her sexuality becomes one element of a wider refusal to remain the person others have designed.

Foucault famously argues that where there is power, there is resistance. Resistance is not located in a pure territory beyond power; it emerges inside relationships of power and alters them. Bella’s sexual experimentation works in precisely this way. It interrupts the norms that define respectable femininity, exposes the possessiveness behind Duncan’s apparent freedom, and lets her construct forms of knowledge that Godwin’s laboratory could not provide.

But if resistance takes place within power, it cannot be assumed to produce complete liberation. The film at times risks treating uninhibited sexuality as if it were freedom itself. Bella’s work in a Paris brothel is presented as another stage of education: she earns money, meets new people, reads philosophy, and encounters socialism. The sequence is deliberately provocative, yet its surreal lightness can romanticize an industry structured by economic inequality and male access to women’s bodies.

Feminist debates about sex work are divided for a reason. One position emphasizes labor, consent, and bodily autonomy; another emphasizes coercion, material vulnerability, and patriarchal exploitation. Poor Things largely gives Bella an exceptional degree of control, even when she is economically vulnerable. That choice protects the film’s emancipatory arc, but it also softens the conditions under which many women enter and experience sexual labor.

The Ambivalence of Looking

The film’s explicit sexual imagery produces a second difficulty. Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze describes a visual system in which men act and look while women are arranged as spectacles. Poor Things clearly attempts to reverse that structure: Bella is active, demanding, comic, and often indifferent to male approval. The men who seek to possess her are repeatedly made ridiculous.

Even so, a representation of female sexual agency does not automatically escape the visual economy of objectification. The camera’s sustained attention to Bella’s body can invite two readings at once. It can make her pleasure visible on her own terms, and it can turn a famous actress’s body into a spectacle organized for the viewer. The ambiguity cannot be resolved merely by declaring the film feminist.

This is not an argument for removing sexual imagery. It is a question about who is granted interiority and who becomes available to be looked at. Early in the film, Max asks whether Godwin has considered a sexual relationship with Bella. The exchange places sexual access to her body within the horizon of male discussion before she can participate in that discussion herself. Duncan later treats her as the instrument of his fantasies. The film criticizes these men, yet it also builds much of its visual fascination around the same body they desire.

A Happy Ending—or Power Reorganized?

The ending appears to resolve Bella’s struggle triumphantly. Having rediscovered the life of Victoria Blessington, she confronts Alfie, who confines her and announces his intention to perform a clitoridectomy. Bella escapes after sedating him; when he tries to shoot her, he wounds himself. Back at Godwin’s estate, she gives Alfie the brain of a goat. She marries Max by choice, studies medicine, and assumes authority within the household that once made her its object.

On one level, this is an unmistakable victory. Bella survives male violence, refuses the identity of Victoria, chooses her relationships, and acquires knowledge that was previously monopolized by men. Yet the final tableau also raises a Foucauldian suspicion. Bella’s freedom takes the form of marriage, professional discipline, property, and mastery over another body. She inherits both the respectable structure of Victorian domestic life and Godwin’s power to transform living beings through surgery.

The former experiment has become the experimenter. Alfie’s transformation is comic revenge, but it also repeats the foundational act of the film: an authority decides that another person’s body can be redesigned without consent. Bella occupies the position once held by Godwin. This does not make her identical to him, nor does it erase the violence she has survived. It does, however, complicate the idea that she has simply escaped.

The modern subject, in Foucault’s account, is not merely constrained from outside. Power helps produce the very self that later experiences its choices as freely chosen. This is the unsettling possibility within the film’s ending. Bella has become self-directing, but the models through which she directs herself—scientist, doctor, wife, sovereign of the household—remain embedded in the institutions that formed her. Power has not disappeared. It has been redistributed and internalized.

The confrontation with Alfie also feels narratively compressed. Bella does not escape through a miraculous external intervention in the strict sense of a deus ex machina; she drugs him, and his own attempt at violence incapacitates him. Nevertheless, the speed with which an apparently inescapable threat is neutralized makes the passage feel convenient. The film moves rapidly from the extremity of patriarchal terror to a stylized image of mastery. That acceleration protects the satisfying ending, but it weakens the biopolitical realism the story has otherwise built so carefully.

Liberation Without an Outside

Poor Things is most compelling when it refuses a simple opposition between domination and freedom. Bella is never merely passive, and power is never located in only one villain. Patriarchy, marriage, medicine, scientific expertise, capitalism, sexual commerce, and the cinematic gaze all make competing claims upon her body. Her desires push back against those claims, but they also develop within the world those institutions have organized.

This is why a Foucauldian reading does not require us to dismiss Bella’s emancipation as false. Her resistance has consequences. She changes, learns, survives, and transforms the people around her. Yet resistance is not the same as arriving at a place beyond power. Every liberated space can generate new norms, new hierarchies, and new objects of control.

The film’s apparent happy ending should therefore remain open to interpretation. Bella’s life is immeasurably more self-authored than Victoria’s. At the same time, she has inherited the laboratory, the household, and the authority to classify and remake bodies. The cage has opened, but its logic may have migrated into the person who walked out.

That ambiguity is the film’s most productive tension. Poor Things imagines sexual curiosity and intellectual appetite as vital forces against patriarchal discipline. It also shows—sometimes deliberately, sometimes despite itself—how readily liberation can be folded into another regime of knowledge and control. Bella does not return to the woman she was expected to be. But neither does she leave power behind. She becomes one of its authors.