Most of the films by the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos couldn’t exactly be called sentimental. Not the grim shock of Dogtooth, certainly not the family murder drama The Killing of a Sacred Deer, not even the sci-fi romance (of a sort) The Lobster. It’s a surprise, then, that Lanthimos’s new film Poor Things, which premiered here at the Venice Film Festival on Friday, takes a long, strange trip toward something like sweetness. 

Based on Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, Poor Things is a sci-fi fairytale Bildungsroman about a Frankensteinian monster as she makes her way in the world. Emma Stone plays Bella Baxter, who is the ward of a mad scientist professor, Godwin (Willem Dafoe), and whose very existence is a freakish abnormality. Inside Bella’s skull fizzles away the brain of an infant belonging to the woman whose body Bella has, in essence, inherited. So she is both child and mother at once, a staggering and language-less toddler housed, bizarrely, in an adult woman’s body. 

Godwin, whom Bella comes to call simply God, has other curious inventions filling the house—perhaps most notably a chicken with the head of a bulldog—but his prize creation is Bella, a daughter figure whose development he watches with a mix of pride and protectiveness. As observed by one of Godwin’s students, Max (Ramy Youssef), Bella is growing up quite fast, acquiring about 15 new words a day, ever steadier on her feet (though still moving in an amusingly jaunty herky-jerk), and increasingly curious about all the wonders teeming just outside her home.

It’s vaguely 1880s Europe, the film journeying from London to Lisbon to Paris, all done up in a fanciful style reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s work. Steampunk elements dot the picture occasionally, backdrops are deliberately false and theatrical, the costumes (a fascinating array done by Holly Waddington) are at times Victorian puffiness mixed with 1960s go-go mod. It’s an arresting film to behold, though its relentless style risks exhaustion. 

As do a few moments of corny indulgence, when Lanthimos inserts a pop-feminist applause line that almost seems to break the fourth wall and mug to the audience. Otherwise, though, the movie’s politics are agreeably pointed. Bella’s trek across a landscape of sex and men sees her gaining ever more mettle and sharp perspective. She becomes a sex-worker philosopher, asking questions of the systems she sees arrayed before her with a directness, a bluntness that is understood to be a part of her whole post-brain-transplant psychological makeup. If Bella doesn’t like an answer, she goes about reordering her environment—it’s something like praxis.

Much of her discovery comes in the form of sex, which Lanthimos stages in vivid detail without a hint of bashfulness. Stone gamely commits to these scenes, as she does to the entirety of this huge, demanding role that carries her from infant to woman in full. It’s a marvelous turn, witty but not overly arch. Stone seamlessly shifts between the film’s comedy and its mounting wistfulness, as Bella comes of age with a keen and hard-won appreciation of her improbable place in the world. This is where Lanthimos gets almost mushy, though he maintains just enough oddball edge to keep the saccharine at bay. 

Stone has sturdy support from her costars. Dafoe remains a master of eccentricity, while Youssef is winsome, sincere but not saintly. Arriving late in the picture, Christopher Abbott does an appropriately slimy villain turn and the great Kathryn Hunter is a prickly mix of motherly and menacing as a heavily tattooed Parisienne madam. Only Mark Ruffalo, as a sleazy hustler who sweeps Bella off her feet (as much as she can be swept; she mostly just enjoys the sex), overdoes it, tipping the scales toward daffy farce.

Which, to be fair, may simply be how he was directed. Lanthimos definitely wants to make us laugh—Poor Things is a comedy above all else. At its best, the film is indeed piercingly clever, proud of its peculiarity to a degree just shy of smugness. Though, the 140-minute film does begin to wear out its welcome in the last third, when the jokes have mostly all been made before and the only fresh additions are cumbersome matters of plot. The epic dimensions of the film—Bella’s Odyssean trek from one place to the next, one lesson to another—are appreciated. Still, Poor Things loses some of its vigor as Lanthimos tries to draw his themes together into a satisfying conclusion.

Which isn’t to say that things don’t end nicely. A kindness and a sense of accomplishment animate the film’s closing scenes; we feel the contented tiredness of arriving home after a long time out in the formative wilds. In making a film about growing up (among other things), Lanthimos seems to have matured some too. He’s still a mischievous provocateur daring people to wince in the face of uncomfortable matter, but in Poor Things he finds grace in the profane and the squalid. He shows us a heart to complement all the whirring of his singular brain.