Last night we watched “Poor Things”. On TV. In the comfort of our own home. The lead actress, Emma Stone, won an Academy Award as Best Actress this year for her role as Bella Baxter. The film has received positive reviews to be sure, has made its investors a lot of money, and has been panned by many of the people I know. It is billed as a comedy. If it’s a comedy, it’s about as noir as a comedy can get.

It’s based on a book, published about 30 years ago, by Alasdair Gray. My guess is that the film and the book are closely related, but quite different at the same time. The book won some awards when it was published as well. I am wondering if I am curious enough to read it.

It also has a lot of sex involving Emma Stone with three men with whom she is weirdly involved, and a bunch of others who are paying her for the privilege (and a brief Lesbian interlude). For this reason, I would support anyone who claims that this movie should not be shown at elementary school assemblies.

It also involves a fair amount of Gore (and not the Al kind), as bodies are cut up or cut into or pulled apart throughout the film.

You see, there was this woman Victoria, who not only had a terrible marriage (since she was married to a mad man, we later see), but found herself pregnant and, at some point near the end of her pregnancy jumped off a bridge into the River Clyde, as it flowed through Glasgow. She wasn’t saved, but her body was pulled out of the water fairly quickly and (for reasons I have already forgot), given to Dr. Godwin Baxter, a mad scientist (and son of a possibly even madder scientist), who took the brain out of the never-to-be-born baby and placed it inside the skull of the baby’s mother, Victoria. This turned out to be super-easy to do. Even a child could do it. No muss. No fuss. Not even any blood.

He names his creation Bella, and she is a fully grown woman with the brain of a just born baby. So she has to learn everything a baby learns, but as an adult. And since she is not a baby, she also has sexual urges that she cannot at all understand, but instinctively knows how to act upon.

God (that’s Godwin’s nickname) hires a young man to help him raise Bella and expects him to marry her, which for some reason the man agrees to do, and they are arranging the wedding when a suave young man appears, sweeps Bella off her feet and takes her to Lisbon and then to Paris; he too is in love with her for whatever reason. And he wants to marry her and she agrees, but she steals all of his money and gives it to two sailors on the ship they are taken to give to the poor of Alexandria (Egypt, not Virginia). This sours their relationship, and they get off the ship in Paris, where she meets a brothel owner who helps her get off her feet and make some money.

Eventually she returns to Scotland where she is to marry the man she left when she went to Lisbon, but this time the ceremony is interrupted by her husband when she was Victoria. In fact, he thinks she still is Victoria.

Bella decides to walk out on her husband to be for a second time, moves in with her Victoria husband, and finds that this doesn’t work any better now than it did then. So she leaves and comes back to the man she was supposed to marry.

She then learns her story, that she is both mother and daughter, which she finds surprising, but something she can live with, and the pledges her love again to her would-be husband. Presumably, they live happily ever after.

This is a really dumb plot. The only reason to see the film is if you want to see Emma Stone having sex again and again. And – that is not a very good reason.