There’s an important scene in Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2009 breakthrough, Dogtooth, in which a pair of adolescent sisters experiment with some borrowed chloroform: “The one who wakes up first will be the winner.” Taken literally, the scene is deeply bizarre; as a metaphor for the anesthetizing, incestuous atmosphere of the girls’ household, lorded over by an authoritarian patriarch, it’s cruelly lucid and on point.
The director’s latest feature, Poor Things, opens with another kept woman being drugged to keep her from the world beyond her door. Having gotten a glimpse of reality, she’s unwilling to close her eyes on her own.
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