Fleapit revisited:Poor Things.

Somewhere in Victorian London there stands a large, curious, house that looks as if it has been designed by a steampunk Antoni Gaudi after he's returned, unable to sleep, from one of Ken Kesey's acid test parties. In this house lives textbook mad scientist Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) and his 'creation' Bella (Emma Stone) as well as a menagerie of bizarre hybrid creatures. For example a chicken that barks like a dog and something that has the body of a dog and the head of a duck. The story of how, and why, Godwin (or 'God' as Bella calls him) created Bella will be at the heart of Yorgos Lanthimos's new, and phantasmagorical, film Poor Things.

Based on Alasdair Gray's 1992 novel. God is a misunderstood genius whose methods are both transgressive and revolutionary, he harbours deep respect for his (seemingly even more bonkers) father despite calling him a "fucking idiot", and his face is so heavily scarred that you could describe it as more scar than face. He also has a habit of coughing up little helium filled mirrorballs that dissipate within seconds.

Bella has been resurrected from a woman who'd committed suicide by jumping into (what looks like) the Thames from (what looks like) Tower Bridge. She walks stiffly, her sentences are awkward and stilted, and, as a suitor later points out, she doesn't know what bananas are, she's never heard of chess, and yet she knows the world empirical.

She is, also, both curious and beautiful so when God invites medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) to the house to assist him in his work it is, perhaps, inevitable that Max falls in love with Bella. More surprisingly, Bella agrees to marry Max and God is more than happy for this to take place.

But when Bella meets with the lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo appears to be really enjoying himself in this role) and he promises her 'adventure', Bella cannot resist her curiosity and sets off with Duncan, a man that Max, quite correctly and to Duncan's obvious pleasure, describes as a "cad" and a "rake".

Both of which he proves to be. Bella and Duncan travel to Lisbon, Alexandria, and, eventually, Paris where they enjoy oysters, libations, dancing, architecture, and, most of all, sex. Or, as Bella calls it, "furious jumping". She enjoys furious jumping, as well as "tongue play" so much she wonders why people don't do it all the time. Duncan, rather proudly, tells her that she's been lucky to have experienced sex with him. He considers himself to be a master of the art.

Though, he is anything but the master of the art of either chivalry or understanding equality. Soon, he tries to control Bella and Bella, as befits a person who can't help but call it as they see it - often with hilarious results, is not one to be controlled. On a cruise across the Mediterranean she befriends fellow passengers Martha (Hanna Schygulla) and Harry (Jerrod Carmichael) who introduce her to philosophy and in a brothel in Paris, where Madame Swiney (Kathryn Hunter) brings her chocolate and clients, she strikes up a relationship with Toinette (Suzy Bemba) and the two of them soon become as enthusiastic about socialism as they are cunnilingus.

All the while, God, Max, and housekeeper Mrs Prim (Vicky Pepperdine) - who has already had problems with Bella interfering with her "hairy business" - receive spidery postcards from Bella recounting, vaguely, her intercontinental escapades but soon enough events in London call for Max to track down Bella and bring her back to God, bring her back to where it all began. Not least because God's new creation, Felicity (Margaret Qualley), is struggling to develop as well as Bella had.

To say the final scenes of the film did not go the way I expected would be something of an understatement. Before we even get there we are already deep into Frankenstein's monster as reimagined by Pedro Almodovar territory (with a side order of Cronenbergian body horror) but soon things get even stranger.

It's to the credit of Lanthimos, and his cast, that despite the overbearing stylishness of everything (the houses, the cruise ship, the outfits, the Jerskin Fendrix score, the cameo from renowned fadista Carminha, even the tricycle Bella rides around on) and the obvious desire to make a film that ranks with Jodorowsky and Lynch in its convention shattering irreverence that he still manages to tell an addictive and wholly unusual story and even slips in something of a feel good factor and a moral message that should feel at odds with the entire enterprise but somehow doesn't. Much like Godwin Baxter, Yorgos Lanthimos, has created a (poor) thing of dangerous beauty.