Poor Things

“Poor Things,” Yorgos Lanthimos’s visually sumptuous and gleefully clever new movie, is so very pleased with itself that it makes a review seem superfluous — well, almost. A phantasmagoric take on the classic Frankenstein story garnished with sour laughs, it tracks the adventures of Bella (Emma Stone), a strange Victorian woman with a childish temperament who has a freakish history, peculiar habits, bizarre surroundings and an attentive if altogether unusual guardian, Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe).

Written by Tony McNamara and adapted from the 1992 Alasdair Gray novel of the same title, “Poor Things” gets its weird on from the get-go. Working in a flamboyantly expressive key, Lanthimos deploys all the elements at his disposal — prosthetics, costumes, meticulous production design and pushily showboating cinematography — to create a familiar yet alien world of calculated dissonance. Baxter, for one, is a crazy quilt of horror, much like Frankenstein’s monster. The child of a scientific madman who experimented on him, he has a face that looks like it was chopped into ragged pieces and then stitched back together by a nearsighted tailor. The parts don’t fit, but they don’t fit with exacting precision.

Like the monster in Mary Shelley’s novel, the movie is a patchwork. In its overall arc it evokes an old-school picaresque; the chapter titles and an interlude in a brothel summon up “Breaking the Waves,” one of Lars von Trier’s movies about a woman enduring a crucible of suffering. Bella scarcely suffers, which is a relief, as is her unladylike gusto and delight in sex.

Scene by scene, polished detail by detail, “Poor Things” throws a great deal out for you to gawk at, guffaw over and slightly recoil from before you’re prompted to giggle again: a steam-engine carriage with a horse’s head, the biomorphic swirls on a ceiling, the bruising colors of a night sky, a feathered dog.