‘Poor Things’ by Y. Lanthimos. Faust in a puppet town

Abstract

Y. Lanthimos’s Poor Things combines a thriller about a mad scientist and a palliata-inspired comedy of swaps. It is proved that apart from the general biopunk aesthetics, the assembly of the movie is carried out for the first time by this director through the introduction of the retcon (retroactive continuity) principle. At each new turn of the plot we encounter figurative thinking, varying the teachings of psychoanalysis about the afterwardsness (Nachträglichkeit), sustainability. Comic motifs are embedded in a situation of substituted consciousness, where the sea is realized as enclosed and the house as an open space. The heroine’s corporeality in the Parisian episodes turns out to be the most universal figure of her being; she has already learned to lock and unlock her own body, thanks to which she can restart all the plots, realizing the retroactivity of her very being. The heroine acts as an ideal magical guest, reorganizing also the posthumous existence of her creator. Lanthimos creates a new type of thriller as a philosophy of hospitality, exposed through the retroactive application of comedic techniques.