Prepare to be charmed and alarmed. Poor Things (C+), the Victorian steampunk comic fable by Yorgos Lanthimos, connects on a very specific polarizing wavelength. Emma Stone plays a deceased and withchild young woman re-animated to life with the sensitivities of her adult body and the newly activated brain of her unborn child fusing and allowing her to explore the world anew with abject wonder. With equal parts daffy comedy and utter creepiness, Willem Dafoe portrays the mad scientist responsible for the protagonist’s rebirth; and Ramy Youssef and Mark Ruffalo are among the hapless male suitors attempting to make sense of the feral femme. The movie wants to be audacious and sublimely feminist and thumb its nose at prudishness, but its bizarre comic tone keeps viewers at a veiled distance. An overlong passage in which the film’s heroine chooses to become a prostitute seems to undercut the film’s thesis of absolute freedom. Stone’s specific mannerisms and many of her wry observations are memorable, but a little of this outlandish content goes a long way. Lanthimos fashions a creative universe with many quirky ports of call but too often sets his characters adrift into unsavory discoveries. Many viewers will undoubtedly be smitten with the originality of this comic curiosity, but the atonal strings music and frequent sequences seen through a fisheye lens promise to give this critic post-traumatic stress.