Show of hands, who wants to hear opinions from a prude who avoids buying any Criterion Collection releases about “sexual liberation” or “sexual awakening”, who went to see a shamelessly, zealously “sex-positive” film?

No? No one? Understood. G’night! See you next entry! I’ll let y’all know when I post some more Disney World photos!

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…you’re still here? Wow, okay, I’ll make this slow and painful.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: every winter is my annual Oscar Quest, during which I venture out to see all Academy Award nominees for Best Picture, regardless of whether I think I’ll like them or not, whether their politics and beliefs agree with mine or not, whether they’re good or bad for me, and whether or not my friends and family have ever heard of them. I’ve seen every Best Picture winner from Wings to Everything Everywhere All at Once, and every Best Picture nominee from 1987 to the present, many of which were worth the hunt. You take the good, you take the bad, and so on. Starting in 2020 I upgraded to the Oscars Quest Expanded Challenge, in which I see how many nominees I can watch in all categories before the big ceremony. Thanks to the expansion of streaming services I’ve seen every Oscar-nominated feature and short for the years 2021 and 2022, even in minor categories like Best Original Song. I enjoyed surprises and suffered regrets.

For 2023 I got a head start and knocked out a few critically acclaimed films before the official nominations are announced January 23rd — those that were doing well with critics and other awarding groups and felt like a lock for further recognition. Hence: Poor Things. Yorgos Lanthimos’ previous film The Favourite was an eyebrow-raising, iconoclastic keeper that deeply amused me and didn’t care if I zoned out during its few, short sex scenes. I’d read a little about his latest, not a lot, so I knew it was NSFW and might be Not My Thing. But I shrugged and rushed in anyway. What’s the worst that could happen?

Yep, there was sex. Yep, each bout was short. No, they were not few. Later at home I looked up to confirm it was indeed somehow rated only R and not NC-17. Either the MPA board is trying harder to look hep these days or they’re far more forgiving to filmmakers and actors above a certain reputation status or box office level. Had the same film been made by nobodies, it’d’ve amounted to a softcore throwback with an immense budget and all the slo-mo foreplay filler cut out. If only Cinemax had kept the “Friday After Dark” block around, maybe they could’ve aired prestige romps like Meryl Streep in Emmanuelle Goes to Monte Carlo. What if we’d found out where a collaboration between Elizabeth Taylor and Andy Sidaris could go? Or imagine if Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson had stayed married long enough to give us Lady Chatterley’s Inventor.

On to what does exist in our timeline: Our Antiheroine craving another Oscar in the most ostentatious way possible is Emma Stone, whose previous win was for the rather chaste La-La Land, which has gotten quainter with age. She’s a pregnant wife named Bella who throws herself off a bridge, only to have her body recovered by local mad scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (four-time Oscar nominee Willem Dafoe). Rather than arrange a dignified funeral and then return to his usual projects (e.g., slicing animals in twain and splicing mismatched halves together For Science), he asks himself and no one else: what if I were to replace my dead wife’s brain with our fetus’ not-as-dead brain, resurrect her, and see what happens? Y’know, For Science? As one does?

Thus begins the life of Sexy Bride of Frankenstein, albeit without the baggage of a seven-foot cadaverous patchwork man betrothed to her. Alas, Lanthimos is no James Whale, so he goes in a different direction. The baby trapped in an adult’s body is forced to grow up in it, nicknames her dad “God” (see what they did there? huh? huh?), and proceeds to demonstrate why the baseline human template was designed for the brain and body to develop concurrently. “God” runs his loose, mostly control-free experiment by letting her roam the castle at will with only minimal instruction, no visible parenting, and rare use of a “no” only when she’s at her most aggravating, as if his true objective were to study what happens when “nurture” is thoroughly subtracted and “nature” is given free rein. Or he’s just a lazy deadbeat dad, whichever.

And what happens without parenting and without even bare-minimum lessons in baseline concepts like “responsibility”, “duty”, “manners”, or “selflessness”? The child does whatever seems fun — i.e., play. What happens without guidance, structure or routine engagement? They turn whatever’s nearby into toys. And what’s a human’s most conveniently accessible possession with more toys built into it than a Swiss army knife? The human body. Soon the toddler-in-an-adult-body discovers the sort of fun that every adult-in-an-adult-body learned sometime past babyhood, which always leads long-term to the same formative fork in the road — one path toward self-control, the other to a lifetime of the great euphoria chase. One path tends to be more well-trod than the other, especially in the dimension of Earth-Hollywood.

So anyway, Preschool Bella finds herself a new hobby…wait, let me start over. Preschool Bella finds a new hobby: herself. Then she learns how to share her hobby with others when she meets Three-Time Academy Award Nominee Mark Ruffalo as a lawyer named Duncan Wedderburn, who sounds like a nemesis for Jeeves and Wooster, with all the sex appeal that implies. He’s more male than smart, and so reacts exactly as any conniving horndog might when encountering a pliable younger woman who looks up to him for lack of any other romantic looking-up-to options. She’s met few other suitors, including an apprentice to “God” played by Golden Globe Nominee Christopher Abbott (Hulu’s Catch-22, A Most Violent Year) who’s so ineffective at literally any function assigned to him that his existence barely registers onscreen. He barely rates as a Sherman to “God”‘s Mr. Peabody, even in the final act when he tries and fails to matter.

So anyway, the studly Mr. Wedderburn and Contrarian Preteen Bella flee the presence of “God” and embark on a grand tour of Europe so they can practice their shared hobby in various exotic locales and see if it feels any differently that way. Their travels take them through a parade of expensive quasi-steampunk sets, often goggled at through Lanthimos’ trademark fish-eye lenses. He does so love those warped perspectives like Michael Bay loves 45-degree-tilted explosions. The kaleidoscopic backdrops and radical decor — along with the bizarre lifesaving appliances built into the body of “God”, not to mention his impossible hybrid animal freaks — contribute to Poor Things making AMPAS’ Oscars shortlist for Best Visual Effects alongside other, arguably more watchable potential nominees such as Rebel Moon.

Marginally More Studious Teenage Bella speaks with slightly more coherence and gets more intelligent as her journey continues — partly through loaded Socratic tussles with random passersby, partly through remembering whatever she picked up from the books of “God” before she left home, most of which would’ve been mad science, all of which she must’ve read off-screen when we weren’t looking. Eventually “nurture” finally puts up its dukes, stops letting “nature” give it wedgies, and contributes to her development. Her brain capacity matures enough for her to understand more advanced concepts such as cruelty, poverty, charity, socialism, and men who are straight-up users. Soon she’ll be a real live College Rebel Bella!

After a time, that pesky “poverty” brings her to a crossroads. She needs money. She still “needs” nookie. Her self-imposed dilemma is “solved” when she finds herself at the doorstep of a Parisian brothel probably in the same district as the Moulin Rouge, yadda yadda yadda, she discovers there’re other fish in the sea, but they smell worse than actual fish and often behave worse than them, yadda yadda yadda, she becomes the mistress of her own fate and “sex-positive” critics who’ve been begging for more sex in movies, because the internet may be running low on porn, write congratulatory thinkpieces. The time-consuming concept of STDs is only referenced once because a 142-minute runtime clearly didn’t give them enough room to cover all the things equally.

And so it went. Much of this is framed as black comedy, which is usually a thing I can get into when my patience hasn’t been tested in too many ways. (Should I toss in even pettier complaints, such as the part where they perpetuate the myth of chloroform as a plot device?) Also, all of this is feminism, in ways, I’m told. Don’t ask me which wave it should be ascribed to. Meanwhile on the bright side, in the background the score by Jerskin Fendrix provides guard rails for an orchestra that seems to be learning how to play their own instruments as the film progresses. Barely syncopated and wildly out of tune at first, over time they take lessons, learn from each other, get it together through trial-and-error and by the end are assaying avant-garde compositions very much in my wheelhouse. Their learning curve was among the few bits and pieces I’d call my favorite in a film that was stridently, madly, unrepentantly, very much Not My Thing. I’ll just be over here standing in the internet’s dunce corner amusing myself with something less relentlessly “sex-positive”, like, say, Archer.

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Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: The most memorable performer of the bunch is Kathryn Hunter, who’s played Syril Karn’s unimpressed mom in Andor, the three witches in The Tragedy of Macbeth, and briefly Arabella Figg in Order of the Phoenix. She’s here as the boss of Working Class Lady-of-the-Evening Bella. She, more than anyone else, seems hard-wired into Lanthimos’ madcap surrealist mindset and really runs with it.

Fellow tourists along the European routes include comedian Jerrod Carmichael (last seen in MCC’s back pages as “The Black Guy From Transformers: The Last Knight“) as the most Nietzschean debater around, and his employer/elder companion played by Hanna Schygulla (Branagh’s Dead Again). The least worst suitor in sight, amid that utterly winnerless competition, is TV’s Ramy himself, Ramy Youssef from Hulu’s Ramy.

After the Ungrateful Whelp Bella flees home with Victorian Lech Bruce Banner, “God” creates a new test subject played by Margaret Qualley (The Leftovers, The Nice Guys), who does not receive her own “sex-positive” arc due to low brain wattage. She remains a possession of The MAN and, likewise lacking in parental guidance, leads a shallow life as an object of slapstick, like a Roomba with flailing limbs.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Poor Things end credits, just Lanthimos’ usual illegible Yorgo-fonted names and ranks, same as his previous films. Behind each list-card is a photo of a setting or object kind of like those puzzles in old children’s magazines where they’d give you extreme closeup pics of various everyday objects — some of them thumb-sized or even microscopic — and dare you to guess what they are. I scored a perfect zero.