Victorian Sci-fi

It's corset time once again for Helena Bonham Carter. After sampling the fiercely contemporary in Fight Club and going all simian on us in futuristic The Planet of the Apes, the English actress is timewarping it back to the 1880s and surrendering herself to one of those period costume roles which made her name. But before your psyche starts dragging up long-repressed memories of the sight of the naked Simon Callow running around in all his glory in Bonham Carter's breakthrough flick A Room with a View back in 1983, this is a going to be a Victorian flick with a difference. Based on the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray's novel of the same name, the strangely sci-fi Poor Things is set in and around Glasgow and the Mediterranean of the early 1880s and tells the bizarre story of a love triangle between two doctors and a clever woman who has rather niftily been created – not born – fresh at the age of 25. Created by a scarily Frankenstinian surgeon – played we expect with usual gusto by Robert Carlyle - by planting a brain from a foetus into a recently drowned woman's skull, Bonham Carter's character Bella falls in love with fellow doctor Jim Broadbent but elopes with another fella to the continent. Sounds barmier than a whole room full of Tyler Durdens but we like it.