Emma Stone Has Never Been Funnier (or Sexier) Than in Poor Things

In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2023, Bilge Ebiri, Esther Zuckerman, and Mark Harris—about the year in cinema. Read the first entry here.

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Dear Bilge, Esther, Mark, and sometimes Sam,

A few weeks ago, a listener to the weekly culture podcast I co-host at Slate wrote in with a thoughtfully argued critique of the use of the word hate on our show. At a moment when hate speech directed toward living humans is growing ever more widespread and harder to contain, with real-world consequences, this person asked, should we not refrain from casually tossing around that incendiary verb when speaking about movies, TV shows, and books? One of my co-hosts replied with a promise to be more mindful about our deployment of the term in the future. It was a legitimate question to raise, and a perfectly civilized exchange of views. But I’ve been thinking ever since about my reasoned defense of hatred as one color in a working critic’s paintbox.

The kind of critical hate worth reserving the word for should never, in my view, be directed ad hominem at individual creators; every filmmaker deserves to have their slate wiped clean with each new film. Deciding how you’re likely to respond to a film based on your opinion of the director’s previous work is a perverse misapplication of the auteur theory: It’s job one, when reviewing a movie, to write about the one that is actually unspooling before our eyes. But of course it’s also impossible to strip away all prior knowledge when walking into a theater, and when a movie has a very strong positive or negative impact on me, not as a critic in a screening room but as a person in a body—when I really love or really hate it—I can’t help but recall that response when the same filmmaker comes out with something new.

I had been putting off watching Saltburn all year because of how much I hated—HATE! ED!—the writer-director Emerald Fennell’s debut, Promising Young Woman, back in 2020. You can read about the reasons why here; suffice it to say that, for all its splashy visual style and an impeccable lead performance from Carey Mulligan, I found that would-be feminist revenge thriller incoherent, simple-minded, and intolerably smug, with a world-historically terrible ending that (I’m pretty sure unintentionally?) winds up reinforcing the very rape culture the movie sets out to expose. Promising Young Woman is not just a bad movie but, to my mind, a pernicious one; its existence, and its proud self-wrapping in a mantle of moral righteousness that doesn’t actually fit the story as presented, is a net negative for the world. And then the bloody thing goes and wins an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay—the exact element of the movie that least deserved recognition! From time to time I still think about this and pace around my kitchen muttering darkly.

So when I heard that Fennell’s second film, Saltburn, was dividing critics at festivals and pissing not a few of them off, I had a suspicion where I was likely to fall along that divide. And because I was having such a good movie season—for one stretch in early fall, seeing what felt like two masterpieces per week—I resisted putting myself in the state that disliking a movie in that way can put me in. But when Mark guiltily confessed in his last post that he had loved Fennell’s provocative second feature, I was inspired to fire up the old DVD player—God bless the distributors who still send out discs!—and give it a watch.

I’m pleased to report that for a surprising percentage of its runtime, the first hour and forty minutes maybe, Saltburn is not only not hateworthy but a pretty good example of an overfamiliar story: a satire about the English class system with a healthy (or rather, pleasurably unhealthy) dollop of homoerotic fixation. An insecure middle-class Oxford student (Barry Keoghan) spends his summer vacation resentfully observing how the other .0001 percent live at the vast country estate of an impossibly posh schoolmate. (The schoolmate is played by Jacob Elordi, who’s spent the whole year being an elusive, super-wealthy object of romantic pining, both here and as Elvis in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla. I guess that’s what happens when you’re a 6’5” dreamboat with an icecap-melting smile and a natural air of insouciant elegance.)

The setup comes straight from Brideshead Revisited—in fact, Evelyn Waugh is explicitly shouted out in one scene—but it also, as Mark notes, folds in the viewer’s assumed familiarity with characters like Patricia Highsmith’s sinister social climber Tom Ripley. There are also echoes (perhaps intentionally on Fennell’s part, given the universality of the premise) of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby and his audience-proxy pal Nick, or of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema, wherein a foxy bisexual drifter seduces a palazzo’s worth of upper-class Italians. None of Saltburn’s observations about how, in Fitzgerald’s words, the rich are different from you and me are particularly novel. But up until that thematically muddled last act, the movie smolders and swaggers with a winning self-confidence, aided by a thoroughly excellent supporting cast: In particular, as the lord and lady of the eponymous country estate, Richard E. Grant and Rosamund Pike give a joint master class in how to invest a stock character type (the daffy, out-of-touch rich person) with both real pathos and real malice.

Barry Keoghan has somehow made himself indispensable to world cinema after just over a decade of appearing mostly as a secondary or tertiary character. I recall watching him scamper across a corpse-strewn medieval battlefield in The Green Knight and immediately thinking, I need to see that kid as King Lear’s Fool and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s Puck. He has a fairylike impishness that shades easily into menace, and more than any actor around his age in movies right now, he could be beamed directly into any past era in film history and seem to make sense there.

No character in the last act of Saltburn behaves like any real human being has ever behaved, and as the savage class politics of the first half curdle into a generalized misanthropy, the movie loses force and direction. But Keoghan’s cannily underacted performance lends the story a moral complexity the script itself never quite earns, and though the final twist is bad—it’s predictable, overexplained by the Keoghan character’s here’s-how-I-did-it framing monologue, and way too drawn-out—the resulting movie hardly reads to me as a reactionary embrace of the poor beleaguered upper class.

Another beautifully acted and designed movie that fell apart in the back half for me this year was Yorgos Lanthimos’ sci-fi fantasy Poor Things (which Mark, I notice, has on his list). I have historically not been a huge fan of the edgelord stylings of that Greek director, who has visual style up the wazoo (sometimes an excess of it; what’s up with all the fisheye?), but who often treats both his characters and the audience with such cruelty that I find it hard to gain entry to the claustrophobic fictional worlds he prefers. But up until the last half-hour of Poor Things, when the movie seems to be frantically shoehorning in several last-minute plotlines from the Alasdair Gray novel from which it was adapted, I was spellbound by Lanthimos’ sex-positive retelling of the Frankenstein myth. A never-funnier or -sexier Emma Stone gives a jaw-dropping central performance, growing from a horny child in a woman’s (dead and reanimated) body to a self-possessed polyamorous bluestocking before our pastel color scheme–bedazzled eyes.

Bilge, unless I missed it, you haven’t written about Poor Things yet this year. I wonder how its steampunk bravado struck you, and whether, like Mark and me, you admired the film’s ambition and sense of humor enough to look past its lumps and bumps (Ruffalo’s accent?!). Or are you more on the side of your colleague at Vulture, Angelica Jade Bastién, who argues with convincing passion that Poor Things “is ultimately ugly—spiritually and narratively, which curdles even its aesthetic splendor”?

Yours in a dreamsicle-orange satin shirtwaist with leg-of-mutton sleeves,

Dana

Read the next entry in Movie Club: Why Is Hollywood Afraid to Reveal These Movies Are Musicals?