“Poor Things” is a deliriously deranged comedy about one woman’s journey from suicidal despair to liberation, thanks to her discovery of the orgasmic pleasures of “furious jumping,” aka “sexual intercourse” done right.

Yorgos Lanthimos, the most successful and mainstream avante garde filmmaker of our age thanks to trippy and witty works such as “The Lobster” and “The Favourite,” creates an homage to the cinema of Terry Gilliam in this dark, bloody and sexually explicit farce. It’s a gloriously over-designed mashup of “Frankenstein” and Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s “Candy” and every other “dirty book” about a young woman’s ribald romp to sexual awakening and self-actualization.

The real source material is post-modern Scottish writer Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel. But screenwriter Tony McNamara (TV’s “The Great”) and Lanthimos visualize it as an eye candy sexcapade about the state of women in a regressive, woman-hating era when even bodily autonomy is under assault by the more Neanderthal corners of the Patriarchy.

It’s a bit excessive, but never less than inspired.

Emma Stone, in what has become the most celebrated performance of the year, plays a young woman we first glimpse as she’s plunging off a London bridge. An accomplished surgeon (Willem Dafoe) who learned from a surgeon-father who carved him at will, makes her reanimated corpse his “experiment.”

Dr. Godwin Baxter is “My God” to his young ward, a grown woman with the literal brain of a child.

Ramy Youssef is Max McCandles, a smart or at least compliant student in Dr. Baxter’s lectures summoned to “study” and take down data on Bella’s progression from infancy to maturity in a steampunk London where sky trams and dirigibles traverse the skyline and horseless (steam powered) carriages have a life-size horse’s head as their de factor hood ornament.

“My God” is given to playing God, surgically creating goose-headed dogs and other duck, rooster and goat hybrids that wander his mansion. He has contrived a stomach-mimicking gadget that makes up for his medical lack of digestive enzymes and such, hooking himself up to eat, finishing each meal with a comically colorful psychedelic bubble burped out for all to see.

Stitching together a “new” woman is just a natural progression of his work.

Bella is a lurching toddler with big eyes and breasts, and a small child’s grasp of language, table manners and impulse control. She lashes out, gleefully joins in the cadaver “cutting” that her father-figure practices and abuses dishware and staff and this new assistant assigned to note her every “advance.”

Dr. Baxter notes the shine Max takes to his “experiment” and abruptly suggests they marry. Bella has no say in this engagement.

But when we see the moment she discovers self-pleasure with an extreme closeup of that magical first-ever orgasm, we have our doubts. When that lecherous lawyer Duncan Wedderburn shows up with the paper work to legalize the restrictive “conditions” of this marriage — she must never Dr. Baxter’s care — we expect the worst.

Mark Ruffalo affects a foppish, mustache-twirling accent as the oversexed and heartless Wedderburn, a rake who seduces Bella, lures her on a grand sex tour — Lisbon, Paris, etc. — of the continent and only realizes he’s in over his head after they’re well at sea.

Bella’s offhand remark at a posh, bawling-interrupted dinner, “I must go punch that baby,” might be the silly sod’s first clue.

But the sex is so good and so frequent he’s willing to let her unschooled cruelty slide, being a cruel creep himself. It’s just that Bella’s sexual curiosity means that her “experiments” are just beginning.

Stone is rightly gaining most of the attention for this daring turn, a role that requires mimicking the physical and verbal truisms of childhood and a long, second-and-third-act string of explicit and over-the-top sex scenes.

“Why do people not just do this all the time?” Bella wonders, and forces us to ponder.

But Ruffalo lands a laugh almost every time he opens mouth, making an amusing character an explosively funny smorgasbord of male insecurities, animal desires and cluelessness. This isn’t just the funniest role of his career, it might be his best performance ever.

Lanthimos puts the viewer through the wringer in this tale of surgically Gothic horror, steampunk tech and fashion-forward evening wear under luridly impressionist chiaroscuro skies.

Sequences switch back and forth from black and white to color, not necessarily simply denoting “the past” (the most colorful) or the fictive “present” (monochromatic) in this design scheme.

The excesses of the sex scenes — Bella clocks in at a French brothel for a stretch — include the fact that there are so many of them. Lanthimos dances right up to that “exploitation” line, and crosses it. It’s probably intentional, considering the picture’s sexual politics.

But at some point you start to feel bad for what this role demanded of Stone, how we get the point, see it reinforced and then wonder what just what the chap behind the camera’s deal was in repeating the message and over-exposing his Oscar winning star in this manner. The repetition slows the movie down so much that the third act becomes something of a drag.

Still, in an age when a New Prurience might be a part of the “Control Women” agenda that “Poor Things” is puncturing, Lanthimos, McNamara and Stone have given us a picture that prods, provokes and delights in any discomfort it might create, a bawdy odyssey that, whatever your reservations, insists on being the Must See Movie of the season.

Rating: R for strong and pervasive sexual content, graphic nudity, disturbing material, gore, and language

Cast: Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo and
Ramy Youssef

Credits: Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, scripted by Tony McNamara, based on the novel by Alasdair Gray. A Searchlight release.

Running time: 2:21