Lord knows he gets lots of the details right. The anti-maskers who insist they can’t breathe with a mask on. Those geniuses who wore masks but didn’t cover their noses. The six-feet distance rule that no one could quite measure correctly. The endless Zoom meetings and videoblogs. The long lines at testing centers and those draconian giant Q-tips they would shove up our noses to get samples. The constant flaring of tempers. And, of course, the outbreak of conspiracy theories (it’s biological warfare! It’s the Chinese! It’s the Russians! It’s Bill Gates!) that began to metastasize, auguring the conspiracy rich world that we are living in today. In one scene, I noticed several rolls of toilet paper neatly stacked on the floor of a character’s home. Aster doesn’t call attention to this cultural relic. It’s just there.

And of course, COVID wasn’t the only thing making America sick around that time—George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis and Black Lives Matter protests sprung up across the country. Everything felt het up, precarious, volatile.

Aster captures this time perfectly. What he doesn’t do, as least as far as I could tell, is give us a unifying theory of all this, something insightful and provocative to chew on. Instead, the movie has a, “That was totally nuts, huh?” quality. (On the other hand, perhaps that’s the only reasonable response to 2020.)

The film’s action takes place in the small New Mexico town of Eddington. Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is the anti-masker sheriff. Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) is the “woke” mayor. Well, I should say, ostensibly woke. He may believe in masks and science but he seems perfectly happy to let a giant, energy sucking technology center start building in the center of town.

Aster has called his film a western of sorts, and the fact that these two men hate each other and often have to face off in nearly vacant streets six-feet apart from each other (no weapons in sight—yet) does contribute to that sense. Social distancing at the O.K. Corral.

While we see a bit of Ted’s home life—his wife left him and he’s raising a mildly rebellious teenage son on his own—the film mostly follows Joe’s journey. At the start of COVID, his bonkers mother-in-law, Dawn (Deidre O’Connell), moved in with him and his sad-sack wife, Louise (Emma Stone). Joe loves Louise with all his heart—it’s his most redeeming quality—but she’s drifting away, falling further and further down the conspiracy rabbit holes her mother introduces her to. And he loses her completely when she falls under the spell of a handsome would-be cult leader (Austin Butler) who spreads fevered tales of secret pedophile rings.

Early in the film, Joe decides he’s going to run for mayor and he festoons his sheriff’s truck with flags and anti-lockdown slogans with questionable spelling (“Your being manipulated”) and photos of Ted Garcia that read: “Get this virus out of office.”

At this point, Joe only has two employees left in his sheriff’s office: Guy (Luke Grimes), who is white, and Michael (Micheal Ward), who is Black. Guy insists that before the Black Lives Matter protest came to town, he barely noticed that Michael was Black. But now he can’t help but wonder whose side he’s really on. (So yes, Aster even nails those “Black Lives Matter made me racist” types, too.)

In the spirit of equal opportunity satirizing, I was amused by how Aster makes fun of the self-righteous teens who protest Floyd’s death while sheepishly apologizing for their own whiteness. “We need to shut up and listen to Black people!” yells one white boy to a crowd of BLM protesters. “Which I will do… right after making this speech! Which, uh, I have no right to give because I’m standing on stolen ground!”

That said, I was a bit puzzled by his introduction of Antifa late in the film. Instead of gently mocking the far right’s vision of Antifa as some sort of militant, ubiquitous force, he seems to buy into it. (It’s parody, sure, but hits differently from the other bits of parody that were so spot-on.) Just for the record, I should note that the final third of the film is extremely violent—like, Tarantino violent.

I can’t say I actually enjoyed Eddington—although I don’t think that was what Aster was going for. He wants us to feel uncomfortable (he succeeds) and he wants us to reflect on the craziness that we collectively experienced. I buy into the “tragedy plus time equals comedy” formula. But maybe not enough time has passed. And the fact that things today feel similarly unhinged doesn’t help matters. If you’re stuck in the middle of a cyclone, do you really need a movie that says, “Hey, remember the early days of this cyclone? Those were wild.”

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I say this with a slight bit of disappointment. I liked Poor Things—especially the super game lead performances from Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo. And I enjoyed the film overall—I’m recommending it. But I really wanted it to have a little more madness, a few more things that made me recoil, provoked me, shocked me, especially from the director who gave us the unsettling Dogtooth and The Lobster. Somehow, despite the wild-eyed and rococo premise, the film is a bit…decorous.

Let’s start with Willem Dafoe as that mad scientist. He is disfigured—because his own mad scientist father experimented on him when he was a boy—but just enough so that you take in his appearance, acknowledge the ungainly flaps of skin on his face, and move on. Now, there is at least something grotesque about him—because his innards were also experimented on, he can’t properly digest and needs a contraption to expel nearly solid burp bubbles whenever he eats. That’s the kind of bonkers imagination I was looking for throughout. It comes infrequently.

The film starts with an image of a pregnant woman about to hurl herself off the London Bridge. Then we cut to that same woman, the now gloriously named Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), no longer pregnant but with the mind and physical aspect of a baby. Yes, Dafoe’s Dr. Godwin Baxter has taken the dead woman’s body and implanted her fetus’ brain in her. Now, he will see what becomes of her and raise her like a kind of twisted father, of sorts, in a house filled with cadavers, mutant animals (a duck with the head of a French bulldog a goat with a duck’s head, etc.), and one forbidding housekeeper. Eventually, he will be joined by an earnest medical student, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), hired to chart Bella’s progress, who is devoted to both the scientist and his subject.

Stone is, indeed, incredible as Bella—it’s a performance that requires all the acting chops: physical comedy, as she stomps around like a drunken toddler; uncommon grace, as she contorts her adult-sized body into childlike shapes and positions; emotional depth, as Bella becomes more and more curious and cynical about the world; and carnal fearlessness, as she explores Bella’s mounting lust.

Inevitably, Bella wants to get out of that house. It starts when she goes on the roof and sees a vast world out there. Then, reluctantly, Godwin allows her to ride in a (closed) carriage and enjoy a remote lakeside picnic. Max becomes even more devoted to her—he’s falling in love. (A credit to Youssef, in a tricky role, that Max comes across as kindhearted, not predatory.) Godwin proposes that Max and Bella get engaged, which they do.

Her ultimate ticket to freedom comes in an unlikely form: A caddish lawyer named Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo), who’s a rake, a lothario, and a bit of a dandy. He seduces Bella, easily—she has discovered touching herself and is now super excited about sex—and they run away together.

When Bella has her first orgasm with him, the film turns from black-and-white to color. (I won’t dwell on this, but this “feminist” fantasy—written and directed by men—tells on itself a bit when it takes a man to achieve this feat.) The peripatetic Duncan expects to have some sex with Bella, turn her onto a few of life’s worldly pleasures, and be done with her—but there’s a bit of a role reversal. He becomes obsessed, besotted, and doesn’t know what to do with himself. It’s great fun watching Ruffalo, who we are used to seeing in naturalistic roles, take on this preening narcissist. Duncan can’t quite figure out whom he’s angrier at—Bella, for enrapturing him, or himself for allowing it to happen.

In one of the film’s best sequences, Bella and Duncan end up on a cruise liner (he’s trying to kidnap her, essentially), where she meets a wizened grand dame (Hanna Schygulla) and her jaded young companion. The grand dame loves Bella’s insatiable nature, her lust for life—but her young companion (Jerrod Carmichael) is threatened by it and tries to corrupt her. It’s an intriguing sequence, seeing these various responses to Bella, and a bit too short in my estimation—but this is what happens, I suppose, when you turn a 336 page book into a two-hour movie.

The next bit involves Bella earning her way at a brothel—she does is partly because she likes sex and partly because she needs the money. Either way, this is another example of the film’s questionable feminist bona fides, but it does allow for another great performance: Kathryn Hunter as the rapacious madam who can’t decide if she wants to seduce, exploit, or devour Bella.

The less said about the final act—involving Christopher Abbott as the husband of Bella’s late “mother” coming to claim her—the better. It feels unnecessarily on the nose—and a bit dreary after all the romping.

All in all, Poor Things is a fun, occasionally bewitching diversion, with a pair of truly remarkable lead performances. I just wish it had gone further. Watching it, I felt a bit like Bella—intrigued, amused, but ready move onto my next adventure.

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