‘Poor Things’: Yorgos Lanthimos is Making His Own ‘Frankenstein’ and Mark Ruffalo Will Star

Mark Ruffalo, a little-known actor who most famously appeared in 1996 horror movie The Dentist whether you remember him being in there or not, has signed on to star in Poor Things, the new movie from Yorgos Lanthimos (The Killing of a Sacred Deer). The scoop comes courtesy of Collider, with the site reminding that Poor Things is a Frankenstein-esque tale.

The movie will adapt Alasdair Gray’s 1992 book Poor Things, with Emma Stone recently joining the cast. Last we heard, Willem Dafoe was also in talks for a potential role in the film.

Deadline recently detailed the Searchlight and Film4 project, “The film will be a Victorian tale of love, discovery and scientific daring. Poor Things tells the incredible story of Belle Baxter, a young woman brought back to life by an eccentric but brilliant scientist.”

Wikipedia recaps the book’s storyline in further detail…

“The main body of the work centres on Bella Baxter, a woman whose early life and identity are the subject of some ambiguity. That ambiguity is complicated by her husband Archibald McCandless’s autobiography, “Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer,” which distorts the truth about his life with Bella. This is followed by Bella’s (or Victoria’s) refutation of its facts, suggesting that her “poor fool” of a husband has concocted a life for her from the prevailing gothic and romantic motifs of the period: it “positively stinks of all that was morbid in that most morbid of centuries”. This is reinforced by the novel’s intricate echoes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

“These fictitious historical documents are prefaced with an introduction by one Alasdair Gray, who presents himself as the editor of the following text, and relates the ‘discovery’ of the papers by his real-life friends, Michael Donnelly and Elspeth King. The introduction also hosts a critique of Glasgow City Council’s treatment of its culture and heritage in the neglect of the local history museum, and a brief mention of Glasgow’s time as the European Capital of Culture in 1990, which would be the subject of a more sustained satire in his novel Something Leather.”

Tony McNamara (The Favourite) is writing the script.