I’ve heard a few people say that, based on the trailer, Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film, Poor Things, looks too weird for their tastes. To be honest, the trailer made me think this ‘gender-bending Frankenstein’, as it’s being sold, looked too weird for my tastes. But let’s be brave. It is Lanthimos after all (The Lobster, The Favourite), and it is the wonderful Emma Stone, whom we are always here for, so let’s not be too afraid. It is weird, no doubt. But it is the sort of weird we can do. And not so weird that I had to Google it afterwards. It has a simple narrative – a journey of self-discovery – that’s not a headscratcher at all. (I saw Studio Ghibli’s The Boy and the Heron over Christmas and I’ve been scratching my head ever since.)

The film is based on the novel by the late, great Alasdair Gray – or plundered from it you could say, as Lanthimos dispenses with its Scottishness and its multiple unreliable narrators. Set now in a surreal Victorian London (rather than Glasgow), this is where we meet our mad scientist, Dr Godwin ‘God’ Baxter (Willem Dafoe), who has a grotesquely fissured face and lives amid a menagerie of the strange, hybrid animals that he’s Frankensteined. Here’s a tip: if you ever want a pet which has the front end of a pug and the back end of a chicken, he’s your man. He might also do you a pig-goose while you’re there. But his biggest experiment is Bella (Stone).

Bella has the body of a woman but the mind of a child, for reasons that will become apparent. She walks clumsily, like a toddler, spits out food, urinates where she’s standing. But she’s learning and progressing fast and soon discovers she’s a sexual being. She is keen to show Mrs Prim (Vicki Pepperdine), their housekeeper, where the source of this pleasure lies. Mrs Prim is not best pleased. ‘She grabbed my hairy business!’ she complains. Bella is unaware of social niceties, has no shame, and this is often very funny.

The men in Bella’s life all want to own her in some way. Baxter wants her for a companion. Baxter’s student, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), wants her as his wife. But Bella wants freedom. ‘Bella want look at world,’ is how she puts it, so she runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, who is clearly having a great time). Wedderburn is a cad and a rake and together they travel to Lisbon, Egypt and Paris. He intends to get bored of her but as she rapidly learns about the world and falls on books and philosophy she gets bored of him first. He can’t keep up with her sexually while she remains baffled about society’s rules. You’re only meant to have sex – or ‘furious jumping’, as she calls it – with one man? ‘It’s just you I do the furious jumping with?’

As this is a Lanthimos film, there are fish-eye lenses and scenes viewed though peepholes, and the sets are fantastically outlandish and Gaudi-esque. There isn’t a single moment where there is nothing to look at. The costume design by Holly Waddington is sensational. I discovered I do want a pug-chicken but I also now know I want an outfit with outrageously puffy sleeves.

You won’t be able to take your eyes off Stone. She has to play a different Bella at each stage of her development, from a child taking her first steps to a grown woman who won’t be pushed around. She is absolutely tremendous. There isn’t a incarnation of Bella I didn’t believe. Or love.

Though it flags towards the end, the film is marvellously entertaining. And ultimately, while it is weird, it is the sort of weird we can do.