Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Poor Things
2023 · Yorgos Lanthimos · Poor Things on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the edges of the frame bulge in early scenes. (camera)
Robbie Ryan shoots Bella's first world through wide-angle and fisheye optics, sometimes pinched inside a circular iris. Banisters curve away, rooms swell at the corners. The distortion relaxes as she learns more.
Payoff: The lens tells you how she sees before the plot tells you what she is. In the reading: perception-image. The reading calls this a perception-image: the act of seeing placed in front of the thing being seen.
Notice when color arrives after the black-and-white opening. (light)
Baxter's house is shot in austere monochrome. Once Bella travels, Lisbon comes in oversaturated pastels and the later cities thicken into warmth. The palette widens with the range of her experience.
Payoff: Color works as a readout of how much world she has taken in so far. In the reading: affective color. The reading calls this affective color: color absorbing a scene's whole feeling rather than describing a place accurately.
Watch how Stone's walk changes from scene to scene. (performance)
She begins with a lurching, marionette stagger and blunt, clipped diction. Gait, gesture and vocal register shift in small increments across the film. No scene stops to announce a new stage.
Payoff: The growing up is built out of physical adjustments. You track her development in the body, not the dialogue. In the reading: attitudes & postures. The reading calls this a cinema of the body: posture carrying the change directly, with no psychology sent in to explain it.
Count the doorways and staircases Bella crosses in Baxter's house. (staging)
The house is built out of thresholds: corridors, stairs, doors she is not yet permitted through. Early on she is framed behind glass or from above. Later the camera meets her at eye level.
Payoff: Her progress is staged as permission to cross things. Where the camera stands keeps telling you her standing.
Listen for the strings going sour under a pretty scene. (sound)
Jerskin Fendrix writes conventional string lines and then interrupts them with dissonance and odd timbres. Some cues sit between the room and the score, so you cannot place where the music is coming from.
Payoff: The music declines to tell you whether a scene is funny or awful. It keeps both readings available.
Once you have seen it
Track Wedderburn's clothes and posture across the voyage. (performance)
Ruffalo starts as a confident seducer and comes apart by stages: pleading, weeping, disheveled, undone. Every advance Bella makes costs him another piece of composure he cannot get back.
Payoff: The ruin this genre usually reserves for the created creature is handed to the man who thought he owned her.
Look at how impossible the cities and skies are. (setting)
Nothing was shot on location. Lisbon, the steamship and the painted skies were built on Budapest stages with LED oceans. Airships and unbuildable architecture sit beside gaslit Victorian rooms.
Payoff: The world is openly fabricated, which keeps you from settling into period nostalgia while the satire works.
Notice where scenes end instead of where they resolve. (cutting)
Mavropsaridis cuts away at an angle, often on Bella looking impatient or curious rather than on an outcome. Episodes stop rather than conclude, and the shipboard stretch slows the whole film to a drift.
Payoff: The cutting keeps her attention at the center and withholds the payoffs a plot normally hands you.
Watch what Bella does with each person who instructs her. (structure)
Every city supplies a teacher, an exploiter or a companion: Baxter, Wedderburn, Astley, the brothel, Paris. She takes what is useful, discards the rest, and finishes running the house she was made in.
Payoff: A coming-of-age story usually ends in accommodation. This one hardens against every institution that tries to hold her.
Carry this in: Watch the lens. The film shows you how Bella sees, and the seeing clears up as she learns her way around the world.