Robbie Ryan Poor Things Fisheye

Robbie Ryan Poor Things Fisheye

Robbie Ryan's cinematography for Yorgos Lanthimos's Poor Things (2023) represents one of cinema's most intentional and sustained deployments of extreme wide-angle and fisheye optics as a storytelling instrument. The film's visual language - shot on custom-built lenses, including a 6mm fisheye providing near-180-degree coverage - externalises protagonist Bella Baxter's expanding, distorted perception of a world she is experiencing for the first time.

Background and Intent

Robbie Ryan, the Irish-born cinematographer also known for his work on Marriage Story (2019, dir. Noah Baumbach) and American Honey (2016, dir. Andrea Arnold), is an alumnus of the handheld intimacy school. His work with Lanthimos on The Favourite (2018) introduced the fisheye grammar to their collaboration - that film's use of ultra-wide angles to distort palace spaces and power geometries was a precursor to Poor Things's more systematic deployment.

For Poor Things, Ryan and Lanthimos agreed that Bella's subjective experience - she is an adult woman with the newly implanted brain of an infant, essentially perceiving the world without preconception - demanded a lens language that itself distorts conventional perspective. The fisheye creates a bubble of heightened presence around the subject at centre frame while extreme barrel distortion warps the periphery, externalising a consciousness that has not yet learned to normalise perception.

Technical Execution

The film was shot on 35mm film, with Ryan using custom-modified lenses to achieve fisheye coverage in a 35mm gate. The use of film rather than digital was deliberate - the grain and tonal response of 35mm adds a physical, embodied quality that pure digital capture lacks. The film also uses black-and-white photography for certain flashback sequences, with the full-colour fisheye grammar reserved for the present-tense narrative.

The production design by Shona Heath and James Price - deliberately fantastical architecture, supersaturated colours, impossible spaces - was built in collaboration with Ryan's lens choices. Locations and sets were designed knowing they would be photographed through a perspective that curves all rectilinear geometry.

Legacy

The film won the Golden Lion at Venice 2023 and revived critical interest in deliberate optical distortion as a tool of point-of-view cinematography. Ryan's work demonstrated that fisheye and extreme wide optics, long associated with sports action cameras and amateur wide shots, could be deployed with the same intentionality as any other cinematographic decision.