In addition to the scars that disfigure him and the terrible impairments of his body, Godwin Baxter also owes his father a sincere passion for the scientific method and surgical practices. The experiment that makes him most proud is Bella, who he treats like a daughter. She found her dead, pregnant with a still-living fetus, and gave her breathing again and transplanted the newborn’s brain. Now Bella, already grown up and splendid in her body, also grows rapidly in her mental faculties, learning to walk, talk and, above all, desire. At this point, her creator’s attempt to stop her is useless: God (win) gave her life and, with it, her free will.

The child woman goes to discover the world with a new, hungry and primordial gaze, which has no memory of the rules and prejudices that drive society, she knows no shame but only curiosity. You will experience how her behavior is against the norm, and how far the norm is from both logic and nature.

What better opportunity for Lanthimos to do better and better what she has always done? Emma Stone’s Beauty is in fact the ideal viaticum, the distorted lens needed to clearly look at reality in its main components (already illuminated in The Favourite): monstrosity and irony.

Poor creatures! she adds or consecrates another: freedom. A risky dimension, always elusive, because, in science as in existence, “it is like this until another way is found” and again and again. Is an anthropological and social transformation therefore possible? A real freedom for women? Or is it just a science fiction tale? To answer, the Greek director launches his Eva on a timeless journey (not much has changed over the centuries in terms of man-woman relationships), simultaneously releasing an explosive visual energy, which blends pictorial and organic suggestions, impressionism and expressionism, enhances the Victorian tale of the Scot Alisdair Gray at the basis of the film, Stone’s interpretative imagination and the imaginative work of the set and costume designers.