"Bodies, for Lanthimos, are ill-fitting shells. Uncomfortable carapaces. We wear them, often awkwardly, because we have to, but we're typically struggling with the urge to take them off, trade them out, or-having failed to control our own-control those of others. Bodies betray us, fall apart, stop working, or inadequately represent our true selves. Maybe, if we're determined enough, we can inhabit a different body by taking someone else's."
"Poor Things (2023), Lanthimos's recent Frankenstein riff and lavish Oscar bait, is a strange and unsettling fable that's pretty explicit about the interchangeable nature of bodies. A pig head is sewn successfully to a duck's body, among the film's menagerie of impossible freaks. And if that's possible, then why not utilize an adult human skull for a baby human brain?"
Yorgos Lanthimos portrays the human body as an ill-fitting, untrustworthy shell that people seek to abandon, modify, or replace. His films stage extreme scenarios—forced pairing into animals, familial imprisonment with invented language, Frankenstein-like reanimations—that dramatize bodily fragility and interchangeability. Characters attempt to control flesh, seize others' bodies, or reshape kinship and social bonds to overcome physical limitations. Bodies malfunction, betray identity, and catalyze power struggles over control and agency. Recurrent motifs include authoritarian manipulation, grotesque biological experimentation, and the unsettling idea that identity can be transferred or manufactured through bodily alteration.
Read at Portland Mercury
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