“Lisa Frankenstein” Review: Diablo Cody and Zelda Williams’ Irreverent Monster Mash Misses a Few Key Organs
Kathryn Newton and Cole Sprouse are the saving graces of this half-baked rom-com about a girl who falls in love with her favorite corpse.
Kathryn Newton and Cole Sprouse in “Lisa Frankenstein”
“Weird Science” for the lonely goth girl who spends all her free time reading morbid poetry in the graveyard behind her evil stepmother’s house, the admirably deranged Lisa Frankenstein might be one of the more irreverent riffs on Mary Shelley’s immortal horror novel, but there’s also a full-circle quality to returning the story to the teenage girl who first wrote it.
In other words, Zelda Williams’ directorial debut — a bloody rom-com about a sad outcast who accidentally wishes her favorite Victorian-era corpse back to “life,” and then starts killing people to replace its best dead-guy parts — is more than just a cute pun in search of '80s retro-chic.
A Frankensteinian Wish-Fulfillment Fantasy
The “Fatal Attraction” meets Frankenstein wish-fulfillment fantasy behind Diablo Cody’s very dark script is rock solid, even if it hews closer to the antisocial sentiments of Lucky McKee’s “May” than it does to the pathos of its namesake. No, the problem with this PG-13 kitsch that’s ready for a slumber party is that even as Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton, inspired) sews her decaying 200-year-old dream boy into a fully functional Cole Sprouse, the movie around them is still missing a few key organs.
Lisa Frankenstein may have a killer needle-drop of The Pixies (I’ll give you one guess), the best G.W. Pabst joke you’re likely to find in anything adjacent to YA, and a “Rocky Horror Picture Show” reference that makes it clear where Williams’ and Cody’s hearts lie, but all of that cleverness is wasted on a movie that contradicts the basic principles of its own construction. Scenes have no shape, the world feels half-built, and the reality that’s supposed to bind them together is too unstable for Williams to establish any kind of emotional baseline. What should be fun feels sloppy instead; even the most exquisitely re-animated corpse isn’t going to get very far without a spine.
A Tale of Grief and Reanimation
To be fair, some degree of discombobulation makes sense for a “how rude” story that begins with its heroine mourning her mother’s recent death by axe — Lisa saw it happen from inside a closet — and struggling to adjust to a new school, a new house, and a new stepdad (Carla Gugino, radiating Nurse Ratched vibes from the moment she appears on screen). Things aren’t going well, and Lisa’s father figure seems utterly incapable of offering any help; Dale is played by “Stranger Things” bit-player Joe Chrest, who solves all of life’s problems with a trip to the Ford dealership.
Aside from the anguished poetry of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, Lisa’s most reliable source of support may be her new stepsister Taffy (a game-for-anything Liza Soberano), whose cheerleader energy only emphasizes the impact of our heroine’s traumatic muteness. Taffy means well, but she’s all “girls just want to have fun” to Lisa’s “pretty girls make graves.” Cody’s trademark zingers land (“He’s smart,” Lisa says of her crush, to which Taffy replies: “Is he in a wheelchair?”), but they hardly reveal how these people feel about themselves, each other, or the bloody circumstances behind their blended family.
Because Lisa Frankenstein fails to establish the actual weight of Lisa’s grief before things take a hard swerve into the supernatural — Lisa is too shell-shocked by people’s eagerness to bury her mother’s murder — the rest of the movie is robbed of the foundation it needs to support any of the madness to come. It only takes a few minutes for the film to find Lisa — after being drugged and sexually assaulted by some local dweebs at a house party — retreating to her favorite graveyard to tell its residents that she wishes they could be together. To her, it’s a statement of suicidal ideation. To the nameless corpse buried six feet under, it’s an invitation to live again.
“Lisa Frankenstein” Michele K. Short
A Campy Romp Undermined by Inconsistencies
A freak lightning storm reanimates the mummified creature and sends it crashing through Lisa’s window in a scene that feels like a direct callback to her mom’s murder. But this isn’t a horror movie, so Lisa isn’t scared. Within seconds of recognizing the ghastly intruder, Lisa is subjecting the decaying hunk to a classic '80s makeover montage — electrifying the creature in Taffy’s tanning bed proves to be the only way to make Taffy more vital, but a new wardrobe is always a good start.
Needless to say, Lisa isn’t kidding when she says she “doesn’t think anyone should be forgotten.” However, in a movie that lacks the context to support its tone, that sincerity doesn’t mean much; in a movie that’s unsure if Lisa is a tragic anomaly or a semi-heightened byproduct of the fact that every Friday the 13th, serial killers sweep through the New Orleans suburbs like sunshine (high school is the kind of social norm that movies tend to establish, but Lisa Frankenstein inexplicably does everything it can to avoid it). Williams isn’t shy about pushing Lisa Frankenstein towards summer camp, but Lisa’s emotional reality is so ill-defined that it’s hard to understand how she feels about killing people to keep the creature pieced together, or even how she feels about the creature itself.
If not for Newton and Sprouse’s performances, Lisa Frankenstein would be fully embalmed long before Lisa realizes that she’s completely, madly, deeply in love with the rickety corpse she’s hiding in her bedroom. It’s super refreshing to see a young-skewing wide release that doesn’t try to excuse or apologize for its heroine’s madness (teenagers absolutely understand the idea that perverts need love too!), and Newton makes the most of the license that this PG-13 movie affords her.
“Lisa Frankenstein” Michele K. Short
Lisa hunches, wears a strawberry blonde helmet of hair curled into a million ringlets, and can’t find enough black eyeliner to mask her excitement at creating something beautiful from the discarded scraps of an ugly world, and the movie around her is never more restrained than when its protagonist is unabashedly simping for this monster despite his crimes. Sprouse needs a few more trips to the tanning bed to shed the vestiges of decay and reveal itself as a total BKILF (Boris Karloff, I guess…), but his wordless performance is sweet and endearing from the start, and I love that — even at his most handsome — his tears still smell bad enough to make Lisa puke.
Still, that’s about all the discomfort that this movie can get away with, as the absurd decision to avoid an “R” rating forces Lisa Frankenstein to fight against the desires of its script at every turn. Williams isn’t allowed to indulge in the relative mayhem of her film’s third act, which makes it all but impossible for her to capture its demented romance, or keep any other part of it from tearing at the seams.