• Courtesy Of Yorgos Lanthimos
• Emma Stone won a Golden Globe for her performance as a Victorian heroine like no other.

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos was mainly an art-house favorite until his 2018 historical comedy The Favourite won a slew of awards. Now he brings us Poor Things, an adaptation of Alasdair Gray's 1992 novel of the same name. The movie won the Venice International Film Festival's Golden Lion and, on Sunday, two Golden Globes: Best Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy and Best Actress in the same category for Emma Stone. Playing at the Savoy Theater in Montpelier and Merrill's Roxy Cinemas in Burlington, Poor Things could be one of the most outrageous films ever to have a shot at an Oscar.

The deal

In Victorian London, pioneering surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) takes medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) under his wing. In the doctor's town house, amid a creepy menagerie of Frankensteined animals, Max meets Godwin's most daring creation: Bella (Stone), a woman who literally possesses the brain of a small child, thanks to a timely transplant and resurrection procedure.

Walking stiff-legged, speaking with fractured syntax, Bella calls the doctor "God," but she is no passive or obedient creature. While a bemused Max looks on, she undergoes an accelerated mental maturation, discovers sex and runs away from God's domain with roguish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), who is eager to take advantage of her libido. But Bella is more than he bargained for. On their travels through Europe, she continues to declare her independence and explore her potential, with shocking and hilarious results.

Will you like it?

One thing is for sure: The more awards Poor Things receives, the more debates we'll hear about this provocative, visually stunning film. One X (formerly Twitter) poster aptly called it "Barbie for deranged people." Like the title character in Greta Gerwig's smash hit, Bella is erotically charged and deeply innocent at once and must learn the ways of a cruel world. She has the exuberant selfishness of a young child in the body of an adult, with a rigid, doll-like physicality.

If those parallels lead you to expect a straightforward parable of female empowerment, however, think again. In its philosophical leanings, Poor Things is more reminiscent of Voltaire's 18th-century satire Candide, which also had a naïf at its center. As Bella leaves her sheltered world and discovers poverty and oppression, the viewer wonders whether knowledge really brings power or only pain.

The movie takes place in a stylized, steampunk world only tangentially related to history; this is Victoriana as filtered through the modern imagination. The early London scenes are shot in expressionist black and white, emphasizing the story's links to the 1931 Frankenstein. When Bella escapes to Lisbon, the world leaps into color, and she discovers off-kilter cityscapes suggestive of stage sets, topped off by psychedelic skies. Poor Things demonstrates that CG environments don't have to be drearily fake; they can be deliriously fake instead.

Equally delirious is the dialogue by Tony McNamara, soaked in the same deadpan absurdity he brought to The Favourite and Hulu's "The Great." Bella's unique way of speaking mixes the doctor's lexicon ("empirical") with creations of her own: Sex, for instance, is "furious jumping."

Stone plays the hell out of this role, making Bella convincing at every stage of development. That's a crucial piece of the puzzle, because an actor with less ferocious commitment to the basic silliness of the concept might have turned Bella into a male fantasy object, a precocious Lolita. Wedderburn (a wonderfully fatuous performance by Ruffalo) makes the mistake of thinking she's exactly that. But he learns his lesson: Bella is too willfully weird to be contained. (I'd kill to see a dance-off between her, Barbie and M3GAN.)

Granted, viewers may wonder uneasily whether Bella is mentally old enough to be doing all that furious jumping. The issue of consent finally comes up in scenes set in a brothel, in which Bella graduates from pure hedonism to a more mature understanding of power and exploitation.

But Poor Things isn't a story that seeks to soothe our uneasiness. In the film's dark Victorian theme-park world, everybody's trauma is a given. The doctor speaks matter-of-factly, even affectionately, of the horrific experiments his own father performed on him in the name of scientific progress.

What does it all mean? viewers argue. To my mind, Poor Things reflects on our relationship with our own history, both personal and collective. Bella's story is unsettling because we all want to believe that the embarrassments of our childhood and the atrocities of bygone eras are behind us. But are they? All of Lanthimos' movies revel in the cringe factor of being human. With this one, he makes us revel in it, too.

If you like this, try...

Dogtooth (2009; Kanopy, Kino Film Collection, rentable): Lanthimos made his name with this disturbing dark comedy about a couple who raise their children in isolation and essentially play God with them. Compared with them, "God" in Poor Things comes off as a model parental figure.

Annette (2021; Prime Video): If you enjoy it when European auteurs make gleefully strange movies, definitely see this musical from Leos Carax, starring Adam Driver, Marion Cotillard and a puppet baby.

The Iron Claw (2023; playing at the Majestic 10 at press time): Maybe you want to sample the season's best films, but you're looking for something less ... odd. Don't dismiss Sean Durkin's underrated drama about '80s pro wrestlers the Von Erich brothers. It's a superbly acted family story and a non-saccharine tearjerker.