Poor Things, a 2023 darkly comic science fiction drama directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Also known as the film that turned a Victorian-era woman into a wild, unfiltered force of nature, it’s not just a movie—it’s a full-on act of cinematic rebellion. This isn’t your typical period piece. It doesn’t whisper about propriety. It screams about freedom, bodily autonomy, and the absurdity of control. And at its center is Emma Stone, an actress who shed all expectations to play Bella Baxter, a woman reborn with a child’s mind and an adult’s hunger for experience. Her performance doesn’t just win awards—it rewrites what acting can do when it’s unshackled from convention.
Yorgos Lanthimos, the same director behind The Lobster and The Favourite, doesn’t make movies for comfort. He makes them to unsettle. In Poor Things, he takes the idea of a woman’s education and turns it inside out. Instead of learning to be polite, Bella learns to eat, explore, fuck, lie, and question everything. The film’s world is exaggerated, surreal, and deliberately artificial—paintings that look like cartoons, buildings that feel like stage sets—because it’s not trying to fool you into reality. It’s showing you how fake the rules of society really are. This is rebellious cinema, a genre where stories don’t just challenge the system—they laugh at it while tearing it down. And that’s why it belongs here, on Rebel Flicks.
It’s not just about Bella’s journey. It’s about who gets to decide what a woman should want, think, or become. The men around her—her creator, her husband, her lover—each try to own her, name her, cage her. And she? She just keeps moving. She doesn’t need redemption arcs or tragic backstories. She just wants to see the world, taste it, and figure it out for herself. That’s radical. That’s rare. And that’s why this film doesn’t fit neatly into any box—not romance, not comedy, not horror, not drama. It’s all of them, and none of them. It’s a mirror held up to every movie that ever told a woman to be smaller. And it says: no.
What you’ll find below isn’t just one review. It’s a collection of pieces that dig into the same spirit—the films that refuse to play nice, the stories that twist expectations, the performances that break molds. From body horror that turns flesh into philosophy to courtroom dramas that expose hidden biases, the movies here don’t ask for permission. They take the stage and never leave. If you’re drawn to Poor Things because it made you feel something wild and alive, then what’s waiting for you next? It’s all here. No filters. No apologies. Just films that dare to be different.
Yorgos Lanthimos's Poor Things is a visually stunning, emotionally raw masterpiece starring Emma Stone as a woman reborn with the mind of a child. A bold feminist fable wrapped in surrealism, it’s one of the most daring films of the decade.
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