Movies Like Poor Things

Frequently asked about Poor Things

Common questions people search for, with answers written by us at MoviesPack.

• How was Bella Baxter brought back to life?▾

  Bella was a pregnant woman named Victoria Blessington who threw herself off a bridge into the Thames. The surgeon Godwin Baxter retrieved her body, removed the fetus, and transplanted the fetal brain into Victoria's adult skull. This left Bella with a fully grown adult body but the developing mind of a newborn, which she then grows from scratch through lived experience.

• Why does Bella leave Godwin and travel with Duncan Wedderburn?▾

  Bella's surgically implanted infant brain means she has no inhibitions, social conditioning, or learned shame — she simply acts on curiosity and desire. When the rakish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn offers to take her to see the world, her insatiable drive to experience new things overrides any sense of loyalty or consequence. She sees the trip as an opportunity to gather knowledge, not as a romantic commitment to Duncan.

• What does Bella discover about her past identity?▾

  During her travels, Bella is tracked down by General Alfie Blessington, who reveals that she was once Victoria, his wife — a woman who escaped his abusive control by killing herself. He tries to reclaim her under the guise of restoring her true self, but Bella, now a fully self-determined person, rejects the identity he tries to impose and refuses to be owned by him.

• What happens to General Blessington at the end of the film?▾

  After Bella returns to London and marries Dr. Max McCandles, General Blessington forces his way back into her life and attempts to reassert dominance over her. Bella, now a trained surgeon herself, performs a brain operation on Blessington and transplants a goat brain into his skull, reducing him to a docile, animal-minded creature confined to the garden — a darkly comic inversion of the powerlessness he once imposed on Victoria.

• What does Bella's journey symbolize in terms of the film's themes?▾

  Bella's development from infant-minded adult to independent surgeon is a compressed allegory for the Enlightenment ideal of reason and self-determination, free from inherited social conditioning. Because her mind grows without patriarchal or religious programming, she approaches sex, labor, philosophy, and morality through pure empirical curiosity. The film uses her arc to argue that much of what society calls 'proper' behavior is simply conditioning imposed on women, not something innate or natural.