First trailer released for Yorgos Lanthimos’ ‘Poor Things’

The first trailer for the latest film from Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos has arrived.

Poor Things, an adaptation of the Alasdair Gray novel of the same name, will be released on September 8. It stars Emma Stone in the lead role, and the new clip sees her character Bella Baxter brought back from the dead by the eccentric scientist Dr. Godfrey Baxter, played by Willem Dafoe.

With the trailer depicting vivid dreamscapes, the film looks set to be a surreal affair, as you’d expect from the man who brought us Dogtooth, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Favourite, the latter of which earned Stone on Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. The leading actress Oscar went to Olivia Colman for the same film.

Poor Things is also due to star Margaret Qualley, Mark Ruffalo and Christopher Abbott. Tony McNamara wrote the script. Stone is also set to star alongside Dafoe and Qualley in another Lanthimos project, the upcoming anthology film And.

Stone discussed the film’s themes, and hee character’s trajectory, in an interview with Vogue last month.  “It’s such a a fairy tale, and a metaphor—clearly, this can’t actually happen—but the idea that you could start anew as a woman, as this body that’s already formed, and see everything for the first time and try to understand the nature of sexuality, or power, or money or choice, the ability to make choices and live by your own rules and not society’s—I thought that was a really fascinating world to go into,” she explained.

“Yorgos is European, so he has a little bit more freedom around these things, but I’m from Arizona, and I had my own version of growing up as a girl in American society.”

She went on to talk about her character’s journey in the movie. “Watching Bella mark that journey of going from such a self-focused kind of pleasure-seeking—whether it was, you know, eating way too many tarts in Lisbon or wanting to experience pleasure in all these different capacities that she learns about while being possessed by men—to wanting to become a doctor and help people in a different way, these lessons that we go through in our lives over a long period of time are happening very quickly for her, and it was such a great opportunity to live an entire life that wasn’t marked at all by shame or trauma.”