SummaryInspired by the writings of Jean Genet, Poison deftly interweaves trio of transgressive tales-“Hero,” “Horror” and “Homo”-that build toward a devastating climax. “Hero,” shot in mock TV-documentary style, tells a bizarre story of suburban patricide and a miraculous flight from justice; “Horror,” filmed like a delirious ’50s B-movie melodrama, is ... Read More
Directed By:Todd Haynes
Written By:Jean Genet, Todd Haynes
Poison
Metascore
Generally Favorable
67
User score
Mixed or Average
5.6
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Top Cast
Metascore
Generally Favorable
67
67% Positive
12 Reviews
12 Reviews
28% Mixed
5 Reviews
5 Reviews
6% Negative
1 Review
1 Review
89
The way the individual stories are intercut builds connections between the seemingly discrete tales such that they begin to converge in ways that were not readily apparent. Repeated viewings, I'm sure, would enhance the connections, so smartly are they conceived.
88
Poison is at once disturbing and beautiful, a cereus blooming in the darkest of night. Uncompromising and heady with ambition, Haynes likes to make his audiences think. Poison succeeds in this goal, and increases in power the more you look back on it. Like the most potent movies, it creeps on you. [19 Apr 1991, p.41]
75
Poison, low-budget but with all-human actors, is dark and funny and has something very powerful to say about society and how it applies irrational stigmas to those who do not conform to an often arbitrary status quo. [12 July 1991]
67
Only one of the episodes, a satirical documentary about the mysterious disappearance of an enraged suburban boy, has much resonance on its own. A part of me wishes that Haynes had sold out after all: What’s truly revolutionary about this filmmaker — his perverse, ironic humanity — is only intermittently on display in this quasi-provocative formalist knickknack.
63
Poison is better visually than verbally, though some dialogue in Episode 1 (a missing-kid parody called Hero) got hearty laughs from paying customers in my theater. What 'makes' this exercise, as far as it goes, is polished editing. [12 Apr 1991, p.2D]
60
Poison, which won the grand prize as the best fiction work at this year's Sundance Film Festival, is an imaginative film that, like the infectious Tom Graves, is eventually overwhelmed by its ambitions. The movie needs to evoke more than the ghost of Genet to give it resonance.
20
The three stories do not make a whole in this disappointing arthouse film.
User score
Mixed or Average
5.6
44% Positive
4 Ratings
4 Ratings
22% Mixed
2 Ratings
2 Ratings
33% Negative
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
Mar 28, 2025
6
Watched Poison at 3am when I couldn’t sleep—probably not the wisest choice. It’s bold, brash, and all a bit much when your brain’s half-mush. Some fascinating ideas and striking moments, though. I didn’t love it, but I’m curious enough to give it another go when I’m properly awake
Feb 5, 2024
3
(Mauro Lanari) The "style over substance" can be redeemed if the director scatters his own work with revealing clues of how much the absence of content is representative of the absence of meaning. That's what Wes Anderson did with the mistreated "Asteroid City." In the short films based on Roald Dahl this does not happen and therefore we witness Zen koans expressed with Brechtian tension but which, emptied of value, lead to nothing, even less to presumed superior truths.
