Poor Things · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The moment Bella Baxter opens her eyes for the first time, Ryan's wide-angle and fisheye lenses start bending the frame — a visual strategy that is the film's sharpest theoretical claim. This is perception-image in practice: the camera operates as free indirect discourse, folding Bella's perceptual rawness directly into the optic, so that the distortion we see is not just stylization but cognition rendered visible. As Bella matures across her picaresque passage through Lisbon, Alexandria, and Paris, the lens gradually normalizes — subjectivity itself is pictured calibrating toward the conventional. What she moves through, however, is a world organized by failed ceremonies: every bourgeois ritual she encounters (romantic courtship, philanthropic rescue, Victorian propriety) performs itself theatrically and then collapses under her unembarrassed gaze. This is exactly the satirical grammar Lanthimos inherits from Buñuel — The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie's structural device of social ceremony that can never complete itself translated directly into Bella's picaresque collisions with decorum. That genealogy activates the film's impulse-image logic: Bella's infant-brained appetites — sexual, intellectual, political, arriving before socialization could mute them — represent raw drive encountering the degraded originary world of Victorian respectability, which can only flail and moralize in response. Lanthimos stages all of this through a mise-en-scène of deliberate theatricality — circular iris frames, anachronistic constructed sets, lighting that refuses naturalism at every turn — turning the built world into an ideological diagram. The artifice is not decoration; it is the argument.