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Lisa Frankenstein Comes Alive


Kathryn Newton may be doomed to be typecast as psychotic teens/young adults for as long as she can still pass for the age, but one can’t deny she fits the type like a glove. It’s clearly a lot of fun for her too -she is a born scenery-chewer; and the best thing that Lisa Frankenstein does is let her lean into that. It’s a movie that feels conceptually trite on paper, and in practice isn’t always far off -but has the singular strength of being written by Diablo Cody, whose irreverent approach to dialogue and tone gives the film and Newton’s performance especially the spark of life such a pastiche needs.
It’s also the feature directing debut of actress Zelda Williams, who is a good fit for the material and its arbitrarily retro aesthetics. Consciously emulating 80s teen comedies, Lisa Frankenstein is set in 1989 where social outcast Lisa is starting at a new school with a new step-family after the trauma of her mother’s gruesome murder. Bullied or alienated by just about everyone in her life, in her free time she visits an overgrown cemetery in the woods where she bonds with the headstone of a man who died young in the nineteenth century -eventually resurrected during a fierce lightning storm as a zombie creature, played by Cole Sprouse, who seeks her out.
Not having had any part in reconstructing or reviving him herself, Lisa does not initially seem like the archetypal scientist playing god -and the movie for a while after the Creature first shows up resembles more E.T. than Frankenstein, as Lisa endeavours to befriend and hide away in her closet this decaying Victorian man. There's even a montage sequence (incorporated just to be an 80s cliché) where she has him try on a variety of outfits -it trends more cute than sinister. And while that's not how I would describe a plot that hones in on a teenager's tragic backstory, feelings of anxiety and social alienation, there doesn't seem to be an angle to much of it, in spite of some funny lines and characterizations. To compare it to its closest cousin of a Cody script, Jennifer's Body, it doesn't announce itself for what it is so readily. And as a result it feels for stretches like just another 80s homage -the aesthetics (and the music to be honest) are clearly the only reasons for this choice of setting.
There is a shallowness to the movie certainly -many of its musical references come off as generic and Lisa’s love for silent movies is largely expressed through a single basic motif of the iconic rocket in the eye of A Trip to the Moon. And yet there is also a stylized dream sequence that imitates silent horror and bookended bits that visualize story components through shadow puppets that seem to aspire towards Tim Burton (Corpse Bride may indeed have been an inspiration on this movie). And while these moments are a tad disjointed and don’t speak for the tone or style of the movie overall, they do express well at least that punk undercurrent to Lisa’s personality -which takes some time to come out, but when it does changes the feel of the whole movie for the better.
This is where Newton’s performance really starts to carry things. It comes in a single beat, which does keep it from being wholly convincing on a narrative level, yet it allows Newton to play a fun and funny psychopathy. In this the movie proves itself more bold than initially construed, far less the supernatural-themed rom-com it may have been sold as (the romantic element to Lisa’s relationship to the Creature is nicely underplayed, and when it does surface it’s not with any semblance of earnestness). Indeed as the movie goes along, it just leans more into its darkly comic sensibility. For a movie set in the 80s, it finds more of an ironic 90s groove to slide into that seems to fit really well with Cody's sense of humour. Various characters have to die in order to give the Creature back missing body parts, and every time it is played with a deliciously twisted glee. At the same time the further in she goes Lisa becomes less an image of a conventional high school underdog and more of a wild, anarchic spirit.
The film is quite funny here as well, and to give credit to Williams, she stages a comic interplay or darkly humourous beat smartly (I guess having a knack for this runs in the family). But as the movie may follow up a brutal murder with an upbeat rendition of "I Just Can't Fight This Feeling" or incorporate a janky tanning bed as both resurrection lab and death machine, the film does attempt to cultivate some sense of a heart. It fails to materialize in that romance, due in part to the limitations of Sprouse's performance (that said, it is an asset that the part doesn't require speech at all). Yet there is a genuine sweetness wrung out of Lisa's relationship with her step-sister Taffy (Liza Soberano) -a ditzy cheerleader who is her polar opposite in temperament and style, yet who routinely sticks up for Lisa and really adorably tries to befriend her. It's a nice small subversion of a trope and makes for a good endearing throughline in a movie that doesn't find such a thing anywhere else.
There is some fun too in Carla Gugino as Lisa's cruel stepmother determined to have her committed -though why Lisa's father married her so soon after the death of her mother is never explored (her dad is played by Stranger Things's Joe Chrest, playing the exact same terminally disinterested father figure as he does on that show). There are several points like that throughout the story that the movie prefers to brush over. And it reinforces to a degree the movie's mere moderate aims, yet it's also a touch refreshing to have the trauma of Lisa's backstory not follow her through the whole narrative.
Lisa Frankenstein is not a very clever or conceptually ambitious movie, and in its early goings it doesn't make much a case for itself as more than a throwback. Yet it is improved by the thrill of Newton's performance and a vicious sense of humour in the script. It's nowhere close to one of Cody's best efforts, and maybe with a better focus on tone or a slightly more confident director it would have made a greater impression. But it's entertaining and just deranged enough to be fun. 

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