It feels as though I have spent my entire life anticipating the single piece of art which would combine the irreverent world of Burton’s Big Fish, the absurdist horror of Gilliam’s Brazil, the psychosexual friction of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and the dry wit of 2000s’ Wes Anderson. After a frankly agonising wait, the film has finally emerged that fills this oddly specific gap in the cinematic landscape – a wonderfully chaotic parcel of monstrous brilliance entitled Poor Things.

“If a sleep-deprived Charlie Kaufman took a tab of acid, a couple of Viagras, suffered some blunt-force trauma to the head, and then adapted Frankenstein, Poor Things would be the result”

The most recent work from the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, and possibly his best yet, Poor Things is a chimeric amalgamation of the most unnerving and manic parts of your favourite directors’ psyches – a cinematic representation of the notebook of the one very tired Hollywood therapist that they all probably share. If a sleep-deprived Charlie Kaufman took a tab of acid, a couple of Viagras, suffered some blunt-force trauma to the head, and then adapted Frankenstein, Poor Things would be the result. If David Lynch had lived in 18th-century Prague rather than 1960s’ Philadelphia, he probably would have made Poor Things instead of Eraserhead. But, in reality (and, as is often the case, much more satisfyingly), Poor Things is the climax of a career of obliqueness and idiosyncrasy – an adaptation of a novel in which Lanthimos could combine all the aspects of his inimitable style into one kaleidoscopic fever dream.

That kaleidoscope spins around Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a young Victorian woman with a mysterious and troubling past, who is miraculously resurrected by the gifted and radical surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Inchoate but precocious, Bella thirsts for a taste of the outside world of which she has been deprived under Godwin’s watch. After eloping across Europe with the seductively louche lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), Bella blossoms into maturity while Duncan unravels into insanity. Along the way, our heroine discovers the wonders and horrors of living in her world, a warped, absurdist projection of our own.

It feels ridiculous to even try to comment on Stone’s phenomenal performance since any attempt to do so would inevitably fall flat and tremble adoringly at her feet. Stone is the through-line of the film, not just keeping it afloat (the film is buoyant enough by itself) but positively soaring through an atmosphere of whimsy and desire – Ruffalo holds on for dear life, kicking and screaming all the way. Their equally incredible opposing forces coalesce to startling stability, the occasional turbulence only adding to the thrill.

Although it’s easy (and ridiculously fun) to describe Poor Things in wonderful intertextual comparisons and combinations, the magic of the film lies in its individuality, its peerlessness, and a thematic and aesthetic stance that is wholly its own. Unburdened by the expectations that it so effortlessly subverts, Poor Things is an odyssey of expansion, discovery, and sexual revelry that circumnavigates its way from manic to poignant and back again, picking up every scrap of audacity as it goes. Joining the likes of Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), Annette (2020), and Beau is Afraid (2023) in the ever-expanding category of surrealist-post-modern-hyper-maximalist-tragi-rom-coms, Poor Things establishes itself as a shining standard of this strange compound genre and of contemporary filmmaking as a whole.

“The magic of the film lies in its individuality, its peerlessness, and a thematic and aesthetic stance that is wholly its own”

Poor Things engages all senses at once, and does it oh-so-tantalisingly. Visually, it’s dazzling. Robbie Ryan’s cinematography finds an acute balance between the deranged and the truly beautiful, to stunning effect. Holly Waddington’s lavish costumes similarly bring together the old and the new, blending the sumptuousness of the film’s Victorian setting and its rebellious, maximalist ideology. Not only a delight to watch, the film’s sound is equally delectable – there could not be a more suitable accompaniment to the film than Jerskin Fendrix’s cheeky and dynamic score, somehow simultaneously stripped back and unbelievably lush.

The film’s individuality stands out even when compared with Lanthimos’s previous efforts. The director has always gleefully played around with his twisted sense of beauty. 2015’s The Lobster, one of the greatest romances of the past 20 years, is so stained with ugly cynicism that it’s nigh impossible to finish without falling to your knees and dramatically lamenting the state of modern love. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) is a brutal, churning maelstrom of utter despair, and yet at the eye of its storm is something with profundity and beauty like nothing else. In his previous films, Lanthimos told stories marked by undercurrents of evil, but in Poor Things, he creates the inverse. For Bella, each and every vile aspect of the world is simply an opportunity for her to further explore and understand the beauty of what it means to live. Poor Things vivisects beauty, separating it cleanly into its constituent parts, spreading out its viscera on a sterilised table, and reanimating it into a rich and colourful bloom.

Poor Things is in cinemas now