Lisa Frankenstein, 2024.
Directed by Zelda Williams.
Starring Kathryn Newton, Cole Sprouse, Liza Soberano, Henry Eikenberry, Carla Gugino, Joe Chrest, Jenna Davis, Joshua Montes, Bryce Romero, Trina LaFargue, and Paola Andino.
SYNOPSIS:
A coming of RAGE love story about a teenager and her crush, who happens to be a corpse. After a set of horrific circumstances bring him back to life, the two embark on a journey to find love, happiness – and a few missing body parts.
With the 1989-set Lisa Frankenstein, director Zelda Williams and screenwriter Diablo Cody have created a film so tonally confused it’s uncertain what characters the audience should be rooting for and their motivations. The script is very upfront about the fact the eponymous Lisa is a strange person but also doesn’t seem too interested in explaining how she got to the point where she visits an abandoned cemetery to yap by the same tombstone, eventually wrapping her deceased mother’s rosary around it, while also wishing she was six feet under with this nineteenth-century man who died young.
The closest reasoning there is comes in an early exposition dump flashback montage at a drunken high school party where airhead stepsister Taffy (Liza Soberano) divulges the trauma Lisa went through mere seconds after saying it’s probably not tea she should be spilling to the students of this new school. However, it’s a misguided sequence that makes light of an ax murderer intruder killing Lisa’s mom (her father remarried, which is how she became stepsisters with Taffy) and how depressed Lisa became afterward. Worse off, it doesn’t offer a sense of why Lisa is so weird.
That’s also probably because Lisa Frankenstein has no idea why these characters are doing what they do or what reactions to situations they should have. It’s not long before that aforementioned dead man is brought back to life as The Creature, played by Cole Sprouse, and becomes an overprotective, violent defender of Lisa. He murders someone right in front of her, and she is fine with it, even if, at the same time, the movie also paints her as an average girl going to school looking for a standard relationship with a boy she is crushing on.
This also upsets The Creature, a romantic with a disappointingly wasted tragic backstory. It’s also mildly annoying that the film is in a rush to take away all of the dirtiness from the undead and highlight the boyish good looks of Cole Sprouse, who is giving an expressive performance and working within the limitations of not being able to speak (presumably, Zelda Williams being the daughter of the late great Robin Williams might have played a part in why the direction of that performance succeeds.) They then go on to kill someone else, with Lisa explaining later that she enjoyed the thrill of the first kill, except the film never bothers to show any of that in terms of actual character development or personality. Lisa Frankenstein is a maddening movie to talk about due to a shoddy script that bluntly doesn’t make any sense.
The most frustrating part is that there is a devilishly fun immoral concept at the center here of a high school senior going on a murder spree with her Frankenstein love interest; she wants revenge, and he wants to replace body parts (and they do replace one of those body parts in one of the only truly deranged and inspired hilarious moments.) Whether or not this is a miscommunication between Zelda Williams and Diablo Cody or just another failing of the script, the movie also feels afraid to embrace being that twisted and unhinged. The story constantly pulls punches, drifting off into generic high school romance territory.
Upon Lisa hiding The Creature in her closet, he hands her a “skeezy” shirt to wear to school the next morning, which she, for some reason, agrees to and suddenly becomes more confident. Logically, someone might feel better from a change of wardrobe, but in that moment, the decision feels less character development and more like a bad joke replacing characterization. More to the point, it just means that whenever there isn’t bloodless, far too tame PG-13 murder on screen (severed body parts embarrassingly look like rubber), Lisa confidently embraces a goth aesthetic and personality, sometimes becoming abrasive herself. Then there is her situation at home with a narcissistic mother constantly accusing her of breaking things in the house as a way of acting out from trauma (most of the time, it’s The Creature making a mess.)
These elements veer between comedy, drama, romance, horror, and even a few musical numbers that would have been emotionally affecting in a better movie, with almost no finesse, cohesion, or logic. Even Lisa Frankenstein‘s sense of humor is lame, with scenes where playing dress-up is supposed to be funny. This is all frustrating since Kathryn Newton throws herself into the character and is always compelling to watch, even if the film has no idea what it’s trying to do. The real Frankenstein is the film itself.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com
