Oscar-winning Hollywood actress Emma Stone is to star in a film adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel Poor Things, set in the 19th century and itself borrowing from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Titled Poor Things and scheduled to begin filming later this year, the film will see Stone reunite with Greek film-maker Yorgos Lanthimos, who directed Oscar-winning 2018 historical black comedy The Favourite.

Glasgow Times:

Searchlight Pictures, one of the companies producing the film, describes it as “a whirlwind adventure hopping from Alexandria to Odessa to a Parisian brothel” and “ostensibly the memoirs of late 19th century Glasgow physician Archibald McCandless” in which he tells “the bizarre life of over-sexed, volatile Bella Baxter, an emancipated woman and a female Frankenstein” whose brain is replaced with that of her unborn child after she drowns herself.

The script will be a collaboration between Lanthimos and Australian screenwriter Tony McNamara, co-writer of The Favourite and creator of comedy drama The Great, about the rise of Catherine the Great.

Gray, who died in December 2019 aged 85, illustrated the novel himself and, in a typically playful move, included fake review quotes and presented it as a collection of found documents. The novel won the 1992 Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize.