Hulu has added one of the most celebrated science-fiction movies of the decade to its library, giving streamers a fresh opportunity to experience a film that refuses to look like anything else in the genre. Yorgos Lanthimos's Poor Things, starring Emma Stone, arrived in theaters in 2023 and has remained a defining example of ambitious, unpredictable and visually spectacular cinema. Its new streaming home means audiences can now watch the movie whenever they want, whether that means discovering it for the first time or revisiting its strange, dreamlike world.
Science fiction has taken many forms since 2020. Some films explore the dangers of artificial intelligence. Others deliver huge interplanetary battles. Some focus on intimate human relationships in dystopian settings. Poor Things is different. Instead of a sleek future of flying cars, it creates a distorted Victorian reality. There are strange mechanical devices, oversize architecture and elaborate costumes, so the film feels like science fiction even while it also functions as a dark comedy, a gothic fairy tale, a fantasy and a romance.
The story was adapted by Tony McNamara from the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, and it centers on a scientific experiment that remains surprising in its implications. Emma Stone's Bella Baxter is brought back from the dead by Willem Dafoe's Dr. Godwin Baxter, a scientist whose own body bears the marks of an unsettling childhood. To revive her, Godwin replaces Bella's brain with that of her unborn child. The result is an adult woman whose mind develops from infancy, which means Bella sees the world without the rules and restrictions that society has imposed on her.
That premise could have been merely grotesque, but Lanthimos treats it with a strange combination of sincerity, wit and visual invention. Bella is not a monster or a simple object of pity. She is curious, impulsive and eager to understand the world around her. Her vocabulary grows, her physical movements change and her confidence builds as she encounters new places and people. Watching her develop is the heart of the film, and Stone makes every stage of that transformation feel alive.
Bella Baxter's Unconventional Journey
Much of Poor Things follows Bella as she leaves the sheltered house where Godwin has kept her. She runs away with Duncan Wedderburn, played by Mark Ruffalo, a smooth-talking lawyer who is unprepared for Bella's lack of social conditioning. Their travels take her from London to Lisbon, Alexandria and Paris, although these are not realistic locations. Lanthimos and his collaborators imagine them as exaggerated versions of real places, with impossible perspectives, strange color palettes and architecture that seems to obey its own laws.
What makes the journey compelling is that Bella is never simply rescued. She makes decisions, takes risks and often confuses the people who think they can control her. Duncan expects a naive companion who will depend on him, but Bella refuses to stay within the limits he sets. She discovers pleasure, friendship, intellectual stimulation and even hardship. By the time she reaches Paris, she has begun to understand how much of society is built on inequality and hypocrisy, especially when it comes to women.
Her growing awareness becomes a source of both comedy and drama. Bella says things that no polite Victorian woman would say, and she ignores the social codes that everyone else treats as natural. In that way, the film uses science fiction to talk about real human concerns. Its speculative premise allows Bella to be free in a way that ordinary women in her era would not be. She is not weighed down by custom, shame or the approval of others. She must learn about those forces, but she does not have to accept them.
A Visual World Built on Contradictions
One of the most talked-about elements of Poor Things is the way it looks. Robbie Ryan's cinematography uses extreme wide-angle lenses to distort interiors and create strange spatial relationships. Faces and buildings can appear stretched or dreamlike, which makes the audience feel as though ordinary spaces are turning into fantasy locations. The production design by James Price and Shona Heath is equally important. They build an alternate Victorian world filled with fantastical architecture, mechanical inventions and impossible landscapes.
Holly Waddington's costumes also play a major role in shaping Bella's character. Her clothes are exaggerated, asymmetrical and inspired by many historical periods at once. They show her unusual position in the world: she is a woman with an adult body and a developing mind, so her wardrobe cannot be ordinary. The costumes help tell the story of her growing independence, from structured dresses that look like armor to freer outfits that express her personal choices.
The combination of cinematography, production design and costume work makes Poor Things feel like a movie from another timeline. It is not interested in historical accuracy in the traditional sense. Instead, it creates a period setting that is also a fantasy laboratory. This approach is what allows the film to move between science fiction and fairy tale without losing cohesion. Every visual element supports the central idea that Bella is entering a world made by men, and learning to question the stories they have written for her.
More Than a Genre Experiment
Although Poor Things is easy to describe as a science-fiction film, its appeal comes from its willingness to cross genre lines. It has the intellectual curiosity of speculative fiction, the cruelty and humor of satire, the emotional pull of a coming-of-age story and the visual beauty of a fairy tale. Lanthimos does not soften the strange or uncomfortable moments. Bella's physicality, her blunt speech and her encounters with exploitation are all part of the film's serious commentary.
The movie also asks big questions about what makes someone human. If Bella has the brain of an unborn child, is she the same person who died? Does Godwin have the right to bring her back without her consent? What does freedom mean for a person who has no memory of being oppressed? These questions keep the film from feeling like a simple story of female empowerment. They give it philosophical depth and a genuinely science-fictional structure.
That structure also allows the ending to feel earned rather than predictable. Bella must decide who she wants to be, not just who others want her to become. Her confrontation with the men who believe they own her is both funny and unsettling, and it demonstrates how much she has grown over the course of the story. By the final scenes, she is no longer a blank slate. She is a person with desires, principles and the courage to make her own choices.
An Awards-Season Favorite
When Poor Things was released, it became an immediate awards contender. The film received widespread critical praise for its originality, its performances and its astonishing visual craft. It also found strong support during awards season, taking home four Academy Awards from 11 nominations and winning five BAFTAs. These honors included recognition for Stone's performance, as well as for the film's production design, costume design and makeup and hairstyling.
For Stone, the role of Bella Baxter represented a major career achievement. She had already won the Academy Award for Best Actress for La La Land, but Poor Things gave her a completely different kind of part. It required her to play a woman whose mind is constantly changing, and she brought both physical comedy and deep emotion to the role. Her performance earned her a second Academy Award and confirmed that she was willing to take risks with ambitious directors.
The supporting cast also contributed to the film's success. Willem Dafoe brings strange tenderness to Dr. Godwin Baxter, a man who is both brilliant and damaged. Mark Ruffalo provides a striking contrast as Duncan, whose vanity and entitlement are slowly dismantled by Bella's refusal to play the role he expects from her. Ramy Youssef also appears as Max McCandles, a young medical student who becomes a sympathetic observer of Bella's transformation. Each actor helps build the odd world that Lanthimos creates.
A Long-Running Creative Partnership
Poor Things also matters because it represents an important moment in the ongoing collaboration between Stone and Lanthimos. Their working relationship began with The Favourite in 2018, a dark historical comedy in which Stone played Abigail Masham, an ambitious woman competing for the affection of Queen Anne, played by Olivia Colman. That film earned Stone an Academy Award nomination and introduced audiences to the tension between her warm screen presence and Lanthimos's colder, more absurdist style.
The pair continued working together after The Favourite. They made the short film Bleat, which was shot in Greece and allowed them to experiment with a more theatrical visual approach. Then came Kinds of Kindness in 2024, an anthology film in which Stone appeared alongside Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley. That project was a return to Lanthimos's earlier style, with disconnected stories about power, devotion and the strange ways people try to control one another.
Their latest collaboration, Bugonia, once again places Stone inside one of Lanthimos's bizarre worlds. The two have described their partnership as one built on trust, creative excitement and a shared interest in stories about people who do not fit into normal social systems. Stone has also become more involved in the production side of their films, which has changed the balance of their relationship. She is not just an actor waiting for direction; she is an active creative partner who helps shape the material.
That deeper partnership is visible in Poor Things, where Stone's performance is so fully integrated into the film's visual and emotional language. Bella is not a character who could be lifted out of her setting and placed in a conventional story. She is a product of the strange world Lanthimos built, but she is also the reason the world feels so alive. The movie gives Stone room to be bold, ridiculous, vulnerable and powerful, sometimes within the same scene.
For viewers who have not yet seen Poor Things, its arrival on Hulu offers an easy way to understand why it has become such a landmark film. It is the kind of movie that rewards patience and attention, and it continues to inspire conversation long after the credits roll. By rejecting the familiar iconography of science fiction, Lanthimos and Stone created something that feels genuinely new, even though it is rooted in a novel that was first published decades ago.
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Source:MSN News