Poor Things wins top prize Golden Lion for the best film at the Venice Film Festival. Neil Swain is dialect coach on this Yorgos Lanthimos groundbreaking film.

Lanthimos’s lavish, Searchlight Pictures-backed film was met with one of the most unilaterally glowing receptions for any Venice premiere in recent memory, as critics and audiences alike thrilled to its bawdy, offbeat comedy, dazzling visual spectacle and pointed message of feminist empowerment. In a rave review, Variety’s critic described it as “a vast absurdist odyssey, positively compact at a galloping 141 minutes, that takes in a groaning buffet of settings and ripe secondary characters — all played with relish by a dream ensemble.” Said ensemble also includes Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef and Jerrod Carmichael.

As pundits made their Golden Lion predictions in the last days of the Venice Film Festival, the general consensus was that it all depended on what kind of mood Damien Chazelle’s competition jury was in: playful, in which case Yorgos Lanthimos’s early critical darling “Poor Things” would sweep to victory; or sober, which could tilt the prize toward either of two urgent films about the global migrant crisis, breaking later in the fest, Matteo Garrone’s “Me Captain” and Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border.”

In the end, the jury split the difference, handing major prizes to all three films, plus Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s quiet, cryptic environmental fable “Evil Does Not Exist.” But playfulness ultimately pulled ahead. “Poor Things,” a delirious adult fantasy starring Emma Stone as a horny Frankenwoman on a wild coming-of-age journey, took the Golden Lion for best film of the festival, making good on the breathless buzz surrounding it since its premiere in the early days of the festival.

Lanthimos’s win comes five years after he took the runner-up Grand Jury Prize for his dizzy royalty farce “The Favourite,” which also took Best Actress for Olivia Colman, en route to an awards-season run that culminated in 10 Oscar nominations and a win for Colman. Searchlight, which also steered “The Favourite,” will be planning another full-steam campaign in pretty much all categories for “Poor Things,” which was also celebrated Telluride and will next play at the New York Film Festival; it hits theatres Stateside on December 8.