After the Oscars, Hollywood traditionally recirculates all the films connected to the winners. In the Category of BEST MOVIE NEVER TO WATCH is Poor Things, an R-rated production that reminds you that what passes for entertaining in the shabby world of Tinsel Town can be a real nightmare. Warning, the spoilers you’re about to read can really turn your stomach.  

Emma Stone, who portrayed Bella Baxter in Poor Things, thanked her three-year-old daughter in her Oscar acceptance speech for Best Actress. This would be sweet and endearing if not for the fact that Poor Things is entirely centered around grotesque late-term abortion, pedophilia, sexual deviance, and abuse.  

Selfless love of a child is not on the menu. 

In the disturbed fashion of Freaky Friday mixed with Frankenstein, Poor Things gives further credence to what many people already expect from Hollywood: a morally bankrupt film with abortion accolades. From dissecting a live baby to sexual castration, masturbation, and pedophilic relationships, here are the abortion themes that will make even the most abortion-supporting person’s skin crawl.  

Again, this review contains mature themes and spoilers, so bear with us as we dissect (no pun intended) what—or who, rather—are the “poor things” in this film. 

The Twisted Gist of the Poor Things Plot 

The movie follows Bella through her journey from adolescence to adulthood, from murder to degradation. Godwin, a Dr. Frankenstein-type character, referred to by Bella as “God,” finds her pregnant mother Victoria at the brink of death after a suicide attempt. Though he sees a “spark of life” in her, he seizes the opportunity to experiment with death. He performs a Cesarean section, dissects the baby’s brain, and places it into the mother’s body, creating Bella. Though in a woman’s body, her mind starts off as an infant.  

From this point on, this child is sexualized, desensitized, and used by many for their personal enjoyment.  

Theme #1: Abortionists Pretending to Play God as They Hold Life and Death in Their Hands 

It’s no coincidence that the scientist/abortionist in this movie is referred to as “God” and practically worshipped by his creation, Bella. He performs autopsies as well as surgeries, stitching a pig’s head onto a chicken’s body as one example.

Godwin is an evil, self-serving God, yet one that Bella yearns to mimic. As Bella observes one of his experiments, she desires to mimic him and proceeds to gleefully stab a human corpse in the eyes. Later, an older Bella finds herself observing surgeon-style classes in Paris to feel closer to Godwin. At the end of the film, Bella works to become a “scientist” like Godwin, who later dies from cancer. She butchers and stitches people and animals together like he did, continuing a legacy of death. 

The abused becomes the abuser. 

Theme #2: Normalizing Late-Term Abortion 

While movies cause desensitization to real-life violence, they in no way exclude numbing the killing of the preborn.  

When Godwin decides to put her baby’s brain into Victoria’s body, creating Bella, Poor Things spared no detail in depicting late-term abortion. In a graphic late-term abortion depiction, the film shows the baby stuffed into a jar while Godwin performs a brain transplant to Victoria’s body. One of Godwin’s students, Max McCandles, weakly questions the ethics of the experiment upon discovery.  

Many Americans are like Max, only timidly questioning the ethicality and morality of abortion, and not inquiring as much as they should be. When people refuse to engage their minds, their collective passivity results in gruesome acts, such as late-term abortion.   

Just to be clear, though: All abortion is extreme.  

As a part of his inquiry, Max asks Godwin if Bella knows her origins. Though Godwin lied to her, he absolves himself by replying, “No, but would you rather the world didn’t have Bella?”   

Theme #3: No Dignity for the Dead OR the Living 

It should go without saying, but there is no dignity for the dead in this film. When Bella’s mother Victoria tries to commit suicide while pregnant, the evil Godwin fished her out of the water. Rather than trying to save her life or her child, the film pretends that he wanted to “honor” her by letting her die instead of performing CPR. After all, what life would it be if she hated it so much, she chose to leave it?  

Sounds like assisted suicide reasoning to you?  

Physican-assisted suicide is growing in popularity and legally allowed in Oregon, Washington State, Hawaii, California, Colorado, Vermont, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, Washington, D.C., and Montana. It’s becoming a common thought process to allow someone to die if they’re experiencing depression. Killing someone due to depression is not dignified – offering resources, community, and help to a struggling individual shows them their life is worth living. Godwin’s act pushes the assisted suicide narrative onto a big screen.  

As Bella continues to grow, she’s fascinated, even enthralled by, death, which grows over time. On a date with bad-boy Duncan, played by Mark Ruffalo, Bella spits out her food at dinner because she doesn’t like it. A baby started crying, and she declares, “I must go punch that baby” with every intent to do so. She also excitingly kills a frog earlier in the movie, in addition to her corpse mutilation. 

While no functioning and law-abiding citizen would dream of stabbing dead bodies or punching babies, films try to slowly desensitize the viewer to the atrocities. This film is filled to the brim with blatant disrespect for the living and the dead, and we’d be foolish to think that exposure to it won’t affect people’s behaviors in real life as it shows characters drunk on the idea of death. 

Theme #4: PEDOPHILIA, INCEST, and Sexualization EVERYWHERE  

There’s no shortage of pedophilic and sexualized themes in Poor Things.  

Seeing that Max McCandles is in love with Bella, Godwin suggests he and Bella get married. Max agrees, saying he loves and wishes to marry her, but wants to preserve her chastity until they’re married. Seems noble, but his attraction to her is alarming given that Max knows Bella is an infant in an adult body. What’s also disturbing is Bella masturbating in her mother’s body.  

Has anyone ever heard of a pedophile’s rational – the “minor attracted” individual? 

After running away with Mark Ruffalo’s character, Duncan, Bella begins taking on multiple partners and prostituting herself for money to repay Duncan after giving away his gambling spoils. The film shows a series of men with Bella at the house, with one case being a father who brought his two young sons to watch Bella have sex with him for “educational” purposes.  

By the near end of the movie, Bella asks Max to marry her, and he agrees under the condition of her getting testing for STDs. How romantic. 

In another sick twist, straight from Greek tragedy, the movie also throws in a little virtual incest, as the husband of Bella’s dead mother and her father, Alfie, crashes her wedding, convincing Bella to return with him. She agrees, but later finds out that he’s abusive, cruel, and wants to castrate and then impregnate her, and eventually she escapes. It’s an appalling disaster. 

This is a move designed to take people on a dark journey to death and destruction.  

The themes of pedophilia were popularized in the work of Alfred Kinsey who took the side of sex offenders reporting that children enjoyed being molested. The children of Table 34 were part of the infamous publications, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The horrifying images of the movie that sexualize a child could have come straight from the work of the monsters of Kinsey’s “work,” which has polluted the construct of sex education and films like these since the 1940s and 1950s.  

Such themes certainly tainted the entire film in which sexual attraction to a child-like individual, the celebration of death, and mutilation of humanity passed for art in Hollywood.  

Will the producers take responsibility if a serial killer continues the on-screen horrors in real life?  

As the Empirical Research’s 2015 study, “Emotional and Physiological Desensitization to Real-Life and Movie Violence,” proves, “diminished empathy and reduced emotional reactivity to violence as key aspects of desensitization to real-life violence, and more limited evidence of physiological desensitization to movie violence among those exposed to high levels of televised violence.” Regarding sexually violent movies, it states:   

 “Stronger evidence links diminished empathy with exposure to movie violence. Viewing sexually violent movies led to less empathy for victims of violence several days later in experimental studies with male college students.” 

Here’s the Point 

The film ends with Bella learning the truth about her existence on Godwin’s deathbed. 

Following in his footsteps, Bella takes care of Godwin and Max’s replica creation, Felicity, after calling them “monsters” for repeating the experiment. 

Bad, horrible ideas tend to keep growing. Despite all the awful things Bella endured, she keeps the cycle of disfunction going by transplanting Alfie’s brain with a goat brain. 

Films such as this bleed into real-life ideas and are views that are subtly supported by abortion lovers like Mark Ruffalo, who starred in the film, said on his Instagram, “Tonight at the Oscars, I stand with the women of my @myvoicemychoiceorg, who use this ‘finger heart’ to champion the RIGHT TO CHOOSE.”  

Abortion, the intentional act of killing a preborn child, is an act of playing God, and Poor Things doesn’t try to escape this fact. Godwin wants to be God, but he creates nothing, and instead kills rather than saves life. Abortionists do this every time they perform a surgical abortion or give a Chemical Abortion Pill. Life is not, was not, and never will be theirs to take.  

Why anyone would choose to watch this film is beyond understanding. It had no redeeming qualities, unless giving the thumbs up to abortion, pedophilia, and sexual deviance is good, then by all means.  

But, it’s a hard pass for us.

Kaitlyn Sanchez, SFLA programs coordinator, contributed to this report.

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