Lisa Frankenstein (2024, directed by Zelda Williams). I'm sure the name came first. Surely screenwriter Diablo Cody thought of the play on "Lisa Frank" and tailored a Lisa Frank-inflected Gothic to suit the name? I can't imagine it started with the story. The title is too big a cultural illusion. There are plenty of films where this was the order of operations in their creation, including at least one great one. Cody denies that this is the case. She says that this is just a coincidence, that the genesis of the film is as a distaff reworking of Weird Science. Maybe that's true. I have a suspicious nature. Cody is certainly capable of writing stories of great sophistication. Juno and Young Adult are both layered, complex character studies underneath the hipster dialogue that made their screenwriter famous. That's not this film, alas. This is a ramble-y nostalgia piece. It's so savvy about its time and influences that one can't help but be suspicious about its provenance. It has its pleasures, sure. It's just...if you're not a specific kind of viewer, one raised at the right time and in the right place, one steeped in a specific kind of culture from the late 1980s, then this film is kind of a mess.
The story here begins in the credits, a lovely animated sequence that details the story of a heartbroken musician who dies and winds up buried under a headstone for a bachelor. It's here that Lisa Swallows likes to spend her time. She takes rubbings of the gravestones, and the bachelor, Frankenstein, is the prize of her collection. It's 1989. Lisa lives with her dad and her step-family. Her own mother was (allegedly) killed by an ax murderer. Her step-sister, Taffy, means well, and tries to guide Lisa through the perils of high school society. She's a popular kid, and Lisa is too morose for that. When Taffy tries to encourage Lisa to target the usual popular boys for dating partners, Lisa fixates on Michael, the editor of the school's literary magazine, who Taffy doesn't deign to acknowledge. At home, Lisa's step-mother, Janet, is highly strung. She resents the intrusion of Lisa into her storybook life and is close to having Lisa committed to a mental institution. Taffy at least tries to be a sister. She drags Lisa to a party where Lisa has a spiked drink while talking to Michael and his goth-girl hanger-on, Tamara. When Lisa's lab partner tries to find a place for her to clear her head, he also tries to molest her. Lisa pushes him off and wanders home. The walk home goes through the cemetery. A storm is brewing. Lightning strikes the grave of the bachelor musician. At home, Lisa breaks the bathroom mirror, sending Janet into a tizzy. Fortunately, Janet is heading on a work trip, because the next night, the inhabitant of Lisa's favorite grave comes a-calling. Her love of his grave has not gone unnoticed. He's not in great shape--he's been in the ground for almost a century, after all, but Lisa is a seamstress and makes repairs, regenerating her undead beau with her sister's malfunctioning tanning bed. The first comes from Janet, who has delayed leaving in order to catch out Lisa and send her to the asylum. The Creature eventually brains her, causing Lisa to hit on a source for parts to repair him. She lures her lecherous lab partner to the graveyard, where the Creature kills him for his hand. The deaths don't go unnoticed, however, and Taffy is acting strangely on top of freaking out over her missing mother. Lisa, to her sorrow, finds out why. So does The Creature...
Had this film been made in 1989, it might have starred Winona Ryder and Johnny Depp as Lisa and The Creature, respectively. Thirty-five years later, the filmmakers have gone with Kathryn Newton and Cole Sprouse, both of them probably too old for their respective roles. They cast thirty-year old actors as teens in the 90s--Luke Perry in 90210 is a good example--so it's of a piece, guess. As a visual pairing, Lisa and The Creature recall Lydia Deets in Beetlejuice and Edward in Edward Scissorhands. The film has some of the critique of "nice" suburbia one finds in the latter film, though without the design aesthetic. The relationship between Lisa and The Creature is also reminiscent of Heathers, with its central couple killing their way through the high school. The film is conscious of its influences; Diablo Cody has always been precise about the provenance of her ideas. Where she steals, she leaves the knife.
Revisionist versions of Frankenstein are having a moment right now, with this film tailing after the likes of Poor Things, Birth/Rebirth, and The Black Girl and Her Monster, all released within the twelve months before Lisa Frankenstein hit theaters, and all of those films suggest a failure of nerve for Williams and Cody. They've made, for want of a better word, a cozy version of Frankenstein that feeds off nostalgia. It's a film that uses its bully pulpit to critique a bygone culture, but to what end? Whatever their faults, those other films have a real-world urgency right now that is absent in Lisa Frankenstein. Only at the end does it take the gloves off, and even then, it doesn't land any body blows. It does take a metaphorical crotch shot, though. Something in the cultural swamp has produced a variety of phallus-focused films between the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024 and this is one of them. The real disappointment here is that it doesn't really do much with the moral and philosophical themes of Frankenstein, the ones that are right there on the surface of the Frankenstein myth and ripe for the taking, let alone the ones that lurk deeper in the subtext. It takes more influence from Lady Frankenstein (1970) in which the daughter of the good doctor builds a monster she can fuck. That's more or less the plot of this film.
I don't mean to piss all over this film. I had a good time watching it. The period details are well chosen, whether it's Lisa burning herself crimping her hair and then laying on the hair spray or the slasher movie back story of Lisa's family (and the unvoiced suggestion that she herself may have been the murderer who took an ax to her mother). The film elides the idea that Lisa is the psychotic her stepmother believes her to be, but never really explores the idea. Did she kill her mother? No idea. Do I think she had it in her? Absolutely. She kills other people with malice aforethought.
The film has good performances for the most part. I'm particularly fond of Carla Gugino's weird self-actualizing step-mother, who is part Mommie Dearest, part New Age acolyte. She seems positively gleeful at the prospect of sending her step-daughter to a mental institution. It's a striking performance in a career that continues to accumulate striking performances. Kathryn Newton's title character has the huge eyes to play a Tim Burton-y goth girl even if she's not an animated character, and she has both the mean-girl strut of a born Heather and the outsider insecurities of goth girls who don't find themselves or their people until they leave high school. Cole Sprouse is good, too, in the thankless, mostly silent role of the Creature. He may just escape the ghetto of CW teen dramas with his career intact. It helps that he looks the part, though that may just be the make-up and costume designers at work. Liza Soberano is good as Taffy, the film's lone innocent. Her innocence is exaggerated for effect, but it is as off-kilter as her mother, so it's eccentric in its banality. Most everyone else gets what they deserve in the film's meat grinder, but Soberano really sells the idea that she's happy to have a new sister. That earnestness saves her. The male characters aren't so lucky. This film has a dim view of its male characters. Doug the Lab Partner is the very model of an incel "nice guy," who drugs and rapes girls, while Michael the lit editor's betrayal in order to fuck Lisa's hotter and more popular sister is the icing on Lisa's supervillain origin story. These are characters the film gleefully dismembers.
Beyond the performances, I thought the animated sequence that lays out the exposition during the credits was beautiful, and the matching dream sequence mid-film makes one wish the entire movie had been so extravagantly stylized. That's what this is, after all. An exercise in style. Sometimes, it even rises to the occasion and the tradition of its name-sake(s).
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