Emma Stone is a reanimated corpse with the brain of a baby in Poor Things

This is what is going on in the trailer for Yorgos Lanthimos’ new movie. Searchlight Pictures has released a teaser for the new Emma Stone movie Poor Things — and unlike many teasers, this trailer deserves the name, featuring only 30 seconds of footage and one line of dialogue (two, if you count an extremely camp “ow” from Mark Ruffalo).

Nonetheless, there’s a lot to intrigue and mystify in this collection of surreal imagery from the mind of director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favourite). And it’s not just from Lanthimos’ mind. Poor Things is an adaptation of the 1992 novel by the idiosyncratic Scottish author and illustrator Alasdair Gray, who very much had his own set of preoccupations (including sex, socialism, and typesetting — he not only illustrated all his own books but typeset them by hand).

This is a decent summary, but it omits some of the juicier and funnier details of Gray’s plot and characterization. Let’s break it down by character — with the caveat that Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara (who co-wrote The Favourite and Stone’s Cruella as well as creating the TV show The Great) may not have wanted, or been able to, replicate all of these on screen. The movie looks heavily visually stylized, almost fantastical, while the book takes place in a semi-realistic Victorian world with a few Gothic flourishes. The opening shots of the trailer nod to the Frankenstein story, which Gray riffed on for his book. Otherwise, the film seems to focus on Bella and Wedderburn’s steamship tour. In the book, she has other adventures, including a spell in a Parisian brothel, and a lot of time is spent with Godwin and McCandless (whom Bella calls “Candle”) moping around in Glasgow in her absence.

It remains to be seen how much of the book Lanthimos and McNamara will bring to the screen, but if you’re at all curious, I can’t recommend it enough — like all Alasdair Gray, it’s hilarious, moving, impassioned, and gloriously weird.