Movies like Poor Things

Why it's similar — John Waters's anti-bourgeois fairy tale is the closest spiritual cousin to Poor Things's appetite for grotesquerie as liberation. Both films stage a woman's escape from a patriarchal household into an alternative kingdom whose rules are louder, dirtier, and freer; both deploy production design that treats period dress as a clown costume the heroine learns to take off.

Why it's similar — Kubrick's fish-eyed, theatrically-coloured Britain is the visual template Lanthimos pushes into Poor Things — wide lenses, hyper-saturated set design, a soundtrack that doubles as a foreign body. Both films also use a single protagonist's appetite as a stress test for the institutions around them, even if Bella's appetite is curious where Alex's is destructive.

Why it's similar — Verhoeven's noir works as a counter-text to Poor Things: a woman who has total agency over her sexuality and refuses to apologise for it, framed by a culture that cannot conceive of her except as monstrous. The pleasure-as-power register and the long-take erotic set pieces map cleanly onto Lanthimos's Lisbon and Paris sequences.

Why it's similar — Philip Kaufman's Anaïs Nin biopic shares Poor Things's project of treating a woman's sexual education as serious intellectual work rather than scandal. Both films stage Paris as a laboratory where appetite, philosophy, and authorship are inseparable, and both decline to punish their heroines for the curriculum they choose.

Why it's similar — Jim Wynorski's B-grade slasher is a tonal outlier on this list, but the rhyme is the Frankenstein-feminist substrate Poor Things inherits: bodies reassembled, agency restored by accident, men who built the situation losing control of it. The pacing is much faster and the budget is much lower, but the substrate is the same Mary Shelley DNA Lanthimos is working in.