Poor things: avant-garde spirit and the politics of becoming
An artificial identity keeps you in survival mode: it is built to appease expectation rather than to express authenticity; it adapts for acceptance instead of growth, leaving the self-trapped in defense rather than creation. (Edie Lou).
Few films in recent years have captured the cultural moment as completely as Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things. Although the film was released in 2023, it is worth pausing on it today. Its themes are timeless, and its urgency has not diminished. At once grotesque and luminous, it resists categorization: part feminist allegory, part surrealist painting come to life, part philosophical fable about what it means to become human. Last week we examined the avant-garde and why today’s affluent and radical gestures are quickly absorbed into the mainstream.
Poor Things proves the exception. Strange, unsettling, and intellectually demanding, the film hits the very point: it resists easy classification, moving between surrealist experiment, philosophical fable, and a radical exploration of gender and autonomy. Its force lies not in provocation per se, but in how it stages growth, freedom, and the fragile work of becoming a woman in a world that tries to script her into dependence. A radical process of identity formation: an active authorship of the self. For psychology, fashion, and politics alike, it poses the same question: how do we create identity in a world where institutions and norms demand conformity for stability?
Poor Things is not a conventional coming-of-age narrative. It tells the story of Bella Baxter, a woman reanimated with the brain of an infant, who grows into consciousness in ways that unsettle every assumption about gender, human development, and social order. Her trajectory mirrors, distorts, and subverts what psychologists like Erik Erikson and Lev Vygotsky described as the human path to maturity. But it also highlights what those theories often obscure: the violent structures - of patriarchy, of class, of colonial gaze - within which identity must emerge.
This article takes Poor Things seriously not only as cinema, of course, but as cultural theory in motion. Its costumes, silhouettes, and visual codes demand to be read alongside developmental psychology; its aesthetic avant-gardism illuminates contemporary debates in fashion and art; and its portrayal of Bella as a radically autonomous subject insists on a political resonance. If the avant-garde in fashion struggles today to resist absorption, Poor Things shows us why it remains indispensable: it demonstrates that avant-garde gestures are not just aesthetic - they are existential. Without them, identity and freedom shrink into conformity. And Poor Things is definitely the opposite of conformity. Every choice - from Bella Baxter’s erratic movements, to the grotesque yet playful costumes, to the surreal set design -refuses to settle into what is expected, obviously! That refusal to conform is precisely what makes it avant-garde: it shows that identity and freedom don’t arise by simply repeating the social scripts already in place. When people only move inside the familiar frames, their “identity” is just compliance. And Bella Baxter broke every one of those frames - I can tell you.
Who is Bella Baxter exactly (© of the original picture belongs to the rightful owner)
The Story of Bella Baxter
Who is Bella Baxter exactly? Let’s take a look at the strange, unruly character at the center of Poor Things. Bella begins with the body of Victoria Blessington, a wealthy Victorian woman, who takes her own life while pregnant. After her suicide, the surgeon Godwin Baxter - called God - intervenes, transplanting the brain of her unborn child into her body. The result is Bella: a woman’s body animated by the consciousness of a baby, collapsing all boundaries between adult and infant, mother and child, life and death.
This premise is not without precedent. Poor Things is based on Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, itself a Neo-Victorian text steeped in the Gothic imagination. The 19th century was an era obsessed with the boundaries of science, morality, and the human. It was an era when science and medicine were expanding but also full of questionable, dangerous, and unethical experiments. Surgeons and physicians often operated without consent, using bodies of the poor, the colonized, or women as material for study. In the 19th century, medicine advanced rapidly - anesthesia, antiseptics, pathology, and surgery all developed - but this progress often relied on bodies that were not freely given. In Britain, the 1832 Anatomy Act legalized the use of corpses of paupers (people who died in workhouses with no family to claim them) for dissection. In practice, this meant medical schools had an abundant supply of corpses from the poor. Women were treated as passive objects, especially in gynecology, colonial bodies were objectified and depersonalized, treated as raw data for European science. This produced an environment where surgeries could be invasive, experimental, and ethically dubious.
Literature during this time channeled fears that science was trespassing into divine territory and playing God. Gothic literature became a stage where anxieties about progress played out. Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Island of Doctor Moreau all imagined new “creatures” as metaphors for the fear and thrill of invention. Bella Baxter is written directly into this lineage: a body remade by science, caught between experiment and personhood. Though written more than a century later, Gray’s novel draws on this tradition while also giving it a distinctly contemporary inflection.
Now that we have situated Bella within the Victorian world, we can return to the story itself - a story in which she relentlessly shatters the era’s moral codes, exposing how fragile and artificial they truly are. Bella, from the beginning of her “second life”, does not accept the role of a passive object, which would have been the Victorian expectation for a woman (obedience, silence, domesticity). From her earliest moments, Bella refuses passivity. Though her speech and movements initially recall infancy, she insists on experience with ferocious immediacy - she does not delay or filter her impulses the way adults are expected to do. She lives every impulse immediately, without the filters of propriety, shame, or social training. The men around her attempt to script her life: Dr. Baxter as guardian, Max McCandles, a shy medical student, as a potential husband, Duncan Wedderburn as libertine mentor. Each represents a version of paternal or patriarchal authority. Yet Bella does not remain inside any of their frames; she absorbs what interests her and discards the rest.
As her world expands beyond Baxter’s house, Bella moves through Lisbon, Alexandria, and Paris. Her world quickly expands. When she runs away with the lawyer Duncan Wedderburn, she begins a whirlwind tour through Europe. In Lisbon, she discovers sexual freedom indulging her desires with no shame, which scandalizes Duncan. Her blunt honesty destabilizes him: he wants her as his possession, but Bella insists on being her own. In Alexandria, the picture shifts. Bella is no longer satisfied with mere indulgence; she begins to read voraciously, educating herself in philosophy, politics, and science. When she encounters poverty and social inequality for the first time, she begins to recognize that freedom is not only about desire and shallow acts - it carries responsibility. Her growing awareness and consciousness clashes with Duncan’s shallow worldview. It is in this phase that she starts moving away from him, moving from being an object without self-reflection to self-directed subject.
In Paris, Bella finally leaves Duncan entirely behind and makes her own living, choosing to work in a brothel. What Victorian society coded as shame becomes for Bella a site of independence. By setting her in the position, the story inverts moral hierarchies - she is more free as a prostitute than as Duncan’s mistress or Max’s fiancée. It is here, among women navigating power and survival on their own terms, that Bella discovers both solidarity and intellectual growth. She reads, debates, and sharpens her political awareness, expanding her independence from bodily autonomy into social consciousness. It is here that she discovers the power of women living outside conventions respectability - solidarity, sexuality, and self-determination on their own body. She also discovers her caesarean scar and begins to ask what happened to her body, pushing her further toward self-awareness and the search for truth.
When Bella returns to London, she finds Godwin Baxter gravely ill - the man who once controlled her existence now powerless, a symbol of the authority she has outgrown. At the same time, her past resurfaces: General Blessington appears to reclaim her as his wife, Victoria, invoking law, violence, and property as justification. His violence escalates to the grotesque. When Bella refuses to submit to him as “Victoria”, he threatens to circumcise her as punishment, turning his claim of ownership into an act of bodily mutilation. But, of course, Bella rewrites the script. By the time she decides to study medicine and make her own future, he’s been reduced (literally) to a goat, bleating in the corner. It is darkly funny, deeply twisted, and exactly the kind of ending that insists Bella owns her own story - not him, not Baxter, not Duncan. And Max? Well. He becomes her true companion - an equal partner in crime.
From its opening sequence, Poor Things situates itself in a painterly universe (© Edie Lou)
The Aesthetic Frame: Surrealism, Grotesque Beauty, and Costume as Canvas
From its opening sequence, Poor Things situates itself in a painterly universe. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan frames London, Lisbon, Alexandria, and Paris not as naturalistic cities but as hallucinatory backdrops, recalling the distorted geometries of German Expressionism and the luminous excess of Fauvism. Architecture bulges, skies ripple, interiors glow with uncanny light. At times it feels like watching through a fisheye lens, a perspective that distorts proportion and balance, reinforcing the sense that both bodies and buildings are perpetually unstable. The warped spaces reflect her shifting subjectivity. Just as she resists being contained by social and moral conventions, the film refuses to present a “straight”, realistic frame. Instead, everything bends, stretches, or exaggerates - signaling that identity, freedom, and perception are in flux.
Within this landscape, costume design functions as semiotic anchor. Holly Waddington’s work on Poor Things is not only wildly imaginative, it is Bella’s language - every stitch and silhouette communicate her evolution with the precision of psychological markers. Her early silhouettes - swollen hips, ballooning sleeves, padded forms - deliberately exaggerate proportions to communicate her liminal state. These exaggerated shapes suggest a body that isn’t “proportional” or “settled”. They visually communicate immaturity, awkwardness, or incompleteness - making her “too much” and “not enough” at the same time. It visually mirrors the idea that she is developing in fragments - parts of herself rushing forward, while others remain unformed. She embodies asynchrony.
At the beginning, Bella’s physicality is exaggerated and awkward: she walks with heavy, stomping steps, gestures too broadly, eats with almost comic force. These are childlike motor patterns projected onto an adult body. Her psychomotor development is out of sync with the social roles her body implies. So the costumes and the movements combine to visualize this developmental mismatch. Bella is radically out of sync: her development does not follow the ordinary sequence of growth. In her earliest silhouettes, the swollen hips, ballooning sleeves, and padded forms exaggerate her minimality. They make her appear childlike yet monumental.
As Bella’s independence grows, the garments shift into sharper geometries and striking contrasts. Black-and-white gowns evoke modernist abstraction situating Bella within visual vocabulary that rejects naturalism. She is no longer simply “a woman” within a patriarchal order but an experimental figure staging her own image. When she takes on shorter hemlines and gender-fluid tailoring, the clothing communicates her refusal of the binary frames imposed on her - neither ingénue nor seductress, neither masculine nor feminine, but something that undoes all such categories.
By the film’s end, hybrid ensembles emerge - layers of fabric, textures, and references that resist chronology or cultural purity. These costumes perform emancipation: Bella has absorbed fragments of tradition but refuses to settle into any single form. In doing so, Waddington’s designs do not only dress the character; they mirror the film’s avant-garde method itself - collage, distortion, refusal. The clothes insist that emancipation is not linear progress but the ongoing rejection of frames that would fix identity in place.
The Politics of Becoming: Vygotsky, Erikson, and Bella Baxter
If Bella’s costumes map the contours of her becoming, psychology helps us read what lies beneath those shapes. Erik Erikson described human development as a sequence of psychosocial crises, each stage marked by the tension between dependence and autonomy, conformity and self-assertion. Bella’s story mirrors these stages but in distorted, accelerated form. She embodies infancy in her voracious appetites - her desire for life in all forms, taken without apology - adolescence in her blunt resistance to rules, and adulthood in her struggle for intimacy and purpose. Yet unlike Erikson’s linear model, Bella’s trajectory is recursive: she revisits stages, breaks them open, and refuses the idea of a stable endpoint. Her development dramatizes the possibility that identity is not a ladder but an ongoing negotiation. But by the end, she asserts autonomy. She is not Victoria or an empty ornament or possession, but someone who defines herself. In this sense, her arc fulfils Erikson’s vision of identity achieved: the hard-won resolution of a crisis that most never face so openly.
Another perspective is the one from Lev Vygotsky. He emphasized that learning and identity emerge in dialogue with others. For Bella, every relationship becomes a “zone of proximal development”, a context where she tests new roles. With Max she experiments with tenderness, with Duncan she confronts libertine excess, with strangers she explores the politics of sex and labor. Instead of quietly absorbing the lessons they offer, she appropriates what serves her growth and discards the rest. Vygotsky insisted that selfhood is co-constructed; Bella radicalizes this idea by making every encounter an experiment in self-invention.
The politics of becoming enter here. Bella does not develop in a vacuum but in a Victorian world defined by hierarchy, gender discipline, and colonial inequality. To become herself is therefore a political act, because it requires refusing the roles society prescribes: wife, mistress, dependent - just like today, when everyone is handed a pre-scripted role - defined by gender, class, or expectation - Bella’s refusal shows that emancipation begins with breaking those scripts. But what makes Bella radical is not only her refusal of prescribed roles but her persistence in a creative rather than survival mode. Like a child immersed in play - Vygotsky saw play as the foundation of human development -, she remains in a state of pure invention, driven by curiosity rather than fear. Even at the end, Bella inhabits a space closer to the openness of a three-year-old than to the guarded self-preservation adulthood usually demands. It is precisely this capacity to stay in theta - a rhythm of imaginative flow - that makes her dangerous to convention and luminous as a figure of becoming.
So, why does Bella’s story feel timeless? Because it addresses questions that remain unresolved: how identity is formed, how autonomy is claimed, and how the self resists the roles society assigns. It is raw in its focus on the self, on autonomy, and on the refusal to be shaped by conventions. It exposes identity in its rawest form: the ongoing struggle to claim a true self. Bella’s journey shows that autonomy does not mean abandoning vulnerability or playfulness, but carrying them forward. She moves through the world with the openness, curiosity, and immediacy of a child, yet insists on shaping her own path as an adult. This tension - between self-determination and the persistence of childlike creativity - makes the film timeless. To keep the inner child while insisting on independence is what gives her journey its force: it is identity as invention, a reminder that freedom means staying radically alive. Bella remains raw, direct, and exploratory - a figure who keeps the openness of a child while carrying the autonomy of an adult.
That combination - autonomy with unfiltered honesty - is what makes her a contemporary avant-garde figure. She is timeless and evergreen. She embodies the struggle to become fully oneself against the weight of social expectations. Her refusal to collapse into prescribed roles makes her relevant across eras. Her insistence on curiosity, freedom, and self-definition resists the mechanisms that seek to contain identity. It that sense, Bella is not only a character but a metaphor for the avant-garde itself - always disruptive, always urgent and necessary, and always ahead of the frame - the very system - that tries to fix her into one category, whether into social roles, moral codes, institutions, or conventions.
Poor Things as a True Avant-Garde (© Edie Lou)
Poor Things as a True Avant-Garde
What makes Poor Things really avant-garde is not simply its surreal visuals, or crazy costumes, but its refusal to provide the viewer with the usual safeguards of narrative and morality. It abandons the safety of convention by denying categorization, narrative stability, a coherent frame of the given tools to interpret, or the comfort of the fixed roles. Cities distort, colors oversaturated, fish-eye lenses fracture perspective: reality is not shown as objective fact but as perception, aligned with the world through Bella’s eyes. They show that there is no neutral, objective world on screen - we see reality as she constructs it, which is the core of constructivism: knowledge and perception are not copies of so-called reality but frameworks built by the subject.
Bella does not “grow into” a fixed social role (wife, mistress, prostitute). She experiments, collides, rejects, absorbs, and builds a self that is ongoing. This reflects Vygotsky’s insight: development is co-constructed with others, through social conflict and interaction, not handed down in a straight line. Instead of presenting identity as natural, linear, or inevitable, the film stages it as constructed, contested, and contingent. This destabilizes the audience’s reliance on fixed categories (woman, wife, sane, insane). Poor Things refuses these frames. Bella refuses the categories that would contain her, and in doing so, exposes how fragile those categories always were. She obviously cannot be put into a box - and when categories fail, the viewer is left to question whether their own categories are as solid as they thought. It removes the neutral ground of “objectivity”: we are forced to recognize that our own categories of morality, gender, national identity etc. are, likewise, constructions, upheld only because society repeats them. Bella’s refusal to perform expected roles exposes the audience’s complicity in performing theirs, pushing the uncomfortable question of whether our lives are lived authentically or merely in compliance, numb, shaped for the expectations of others and societal acceptance.
Waddington’s designs underline the constructivist structure of the film perfectly. They refuse period accuracy in favor of signaling Bella’s process of building selfhood. If Waddington had dressed Bella in strictly Victorian garments, the costumes would have reinforced the very categories the story is dismantling. By exaggerating, distorting, or hybridizing period styles, the costumes refuse to “naturalize” Bella as a Victorian woman and instead highlight that identity itself is constructed, negotiated, and never fixed. Waddington communicates a truth - if there is any - through her costumes - a beautiful language she speaks - that is contemporary: selfhood and identity is an ongoing constructed process, always in motion, always being built, and never reducible to the roles society prescribes. This is not only Bella’s story but a contemporary dilemma: how to live beyond scripts that promise stability, yet confine. For many, the problem remains unsolved, caught between the desire for authenticity and the pressure to conform.
Seen from this angle, the film retains its relevance today more than ever. It stages a problem that remains unsolved: how to create an authentic self within systems that encourage performance, conformity, and artificial identity. Bella’s rawness - the refusal to filter experience through shame or hierarchy - exposes the fragility of categories we still rely on. What unsettles is not the explicitness of sex or violence - déjà vu - but their casual treatment, the stripping away of moral codes that normally contain them. The viewer is left without interpretive scaffolding, forced to confront experience unmediated. At a time when cultural production is increasingly subsumed by spectacle and market logic, Poor Things recalls the avant-garde function of art: to fracture consensus. Bella embodies a form of becoming that is resistant to domestication - always incomplete, always testing boundaries. The provocation is not in excess but in rawness: identity as self-construction, autonomy without apology, and the preservation of a creative inner child in a world that would rather declare such freedom insane.
Finally, Bella’s story shows that identity is not inherited but continuously constructed against the pressures to conform. To live authentically is not a private indulgence but a political act, because only from that ground can critical thinking and empathy emerge. An artificial identity traps us in survival mode, numbing curiosity and silencing dissent; an authentic one keeps the inner child alive - curious, creative, and open. Poor Thing does leave a challenge behind: to resist numbness, to refuse performance, and to practice freedom and authenticity as the ongoing work of becoming truly ourselves.
(Of course, this is only an interpretation, not the truth - read through my own fish-eye lens, just as the film suggests.)
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