YMMV / Poor Things

• Alternate Character Interpretation: How much of what Alfie says about Victoria (specifically, about her enjoying cruelty as much as he does) is true? He is certainly motivated to lie, and the only thing the audience sees of Victoria in person (and alive) is her suicide, which could have easily been motivated by a desire to escape her cruel husband and not subject their child to the same treatment, rather than simply her pregnancy. Victoria may have also pretended to enjoy Alfie's treatment of the servants in order to protect herself; Bella finds a notebook with the impression of a page full of swear words, which could have been Victoria's way of venting her true feelings.
• Angst? What Angst?: Dr. Godwin Baxter doesn't seem to hold it against his father that the late older man mutilated him For Science!, except for a wistful acknowledgment that most people struggle with being able to look at his face and a wry admission that the elder Dr. Baxter was "a fucking idiot" whose good advice didn't always match his actions.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Bella's defeat of Alfie is pretty brief and simple, especially after hinting that Alfie's angry and abused servants might be potential allies if they could be rallied.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: The film's numerous sex scenes became the subject of many a conversation upon its release, especially since Emma Stone was not known for stripping off prior to this film.
• Complete Monster: General Alfie Blessington was the husband of Bella Baxter's previous life as Victoria Blessington. A Sociopathic Soldier with an inclination to inflicting pain for pain's sake, Alfie regularly torments and maims his own servants, breaking their arms and in one case threatening to shoot a manservant in the face for improperly preparing a meal. When Alfie gets his hands on Bella, he decides to keep her prisoner, cut out her clitoris to kill her libido, then rape her until she fathers him an heir, all under pain of Bella's death should she attempt to escape. Bella concludes that Alfie's cruelty was such that Victoria decided to kill herself with her unborn child rather than continue living with him.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • After barging into Max and Bella's wedding ceremony, Duncan Wedderburn loudly and dramatically accuses Godwin of being the devil because he's coughing blood into a handkerchief. Max's response is "He has cancer, you fucking idiot." Wedderburn immediately deflates with a sheepish "Oh."
  • Godwin nonchalantly recalling his childhood (from hand torture to castration), due to his deadpan delivery.
    Godwin: I must make my own gastric juices. My father removed my pyloric glands to see what would happen. Turns out we need them!
• Ending Fatigue: Once Bella finally reunites and reconciles with her origin and relationships with Godwin and Max, the film seems to be wrapping up — but then we get a whole extra act involving a brand new character, which seems to exist merely to put Bella's concerns about who she once was firmly to rest.
• Fridge Brilliance: Bella's language skills develop throughout the film, and it's only in the last half that she uses pronouns to address people rather than their names. The final set of pronouns she learns are first-person ones: we, I, me, my, mine. It's the final sign of her gaining full autonomy and personhood.
• Love to Hate: As much as a controlling, selfish jerk Duncan is, his laughably inept attempts at villainy, the repeated humiliations he gets subject to, and Mark Ruffalo's performance make him an incredibly entertaining character to watch.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The film getting added to Disney+ (albeit with parental controls) led to many of the requisite jokes about how Bella Baxter is now a Disney princess.
  • Trying to sum up the movie's unabashedly quirky premise in a Better Than It Sounds way is also a very popular joke, especially concerning Bella's origin story.
• No Yay: In the first half of the movie, she still has the mind of a little girl, so this basically applies to any romantic or sexual relationship Bella is in.
• Quirky Work: The film is unabashedly strange, especially in terms of the visuals, but not to the point of being incomprehensible.
• Squick:
  • A lot of scenes involving Dr. Baxter that avert any type of discretion shot, such as Bella toying with the private parts of a corpse in his lab, or him having Max surgically cutting him open to inspect the abnormal growth in his belly and discover the tumor that will claim his life.
  • Right before Bella has sex with a man, she asks if he is responsible for a smell that she has just caught. He doesn’t respond and they proceed with having sex anyway.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • For readers of the book, the removal of the framing device where Bella/Victoria gets her own say in a postscript that casts the entire account previously into doubt and tells a different story devoid of fantasy. By keeping the film within the fantasy center narrative of the book, it's also been argued that the film traps the story in the male-directed narrative of who Bella was, and removes the reality check that gives the character more depth and lets her have her say. Changes to Bella's portrayal and the framing of the film may or may not alleviate this problem
  • A minor variant. The novel upon which the film is based was written by Alasdair Gray, a hero of twentieth-century Scottish civic nationalism. (His quote, "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" is written on the Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh.) Because of this, the novel is very Scottish, culturally Scottish. By contrast, the film strips out a lot of this Scottishness, leading to some outcry from scholars and fans of Gray's work. However, people who knew Gray shortly before his death have said that Gray approved of Lanthimos's interpretation of his novel.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Every single aesthetic element of the movie is top-notch, especially the lush, vividly-coloured scenery.

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