Review: Lisa Frankenstein (2024)
Competent teen comedy that is not in the least subversive
Lisa Frankenstein (2024)
Directed by Zelda Williams
Written by Diablo Cody
Everyone except me compared last year’s much-nominated steampunk comedy “Poor Things” to “Frankenstein.” I thought the much more appropriate analogy was to “Pygmalion,” but it’s true that “Poor Things” did have a dead body reanimated by electricity in much the same way Frankenstein’s monster is, classically, in movies of the book.
In “Lisa Frankenstein,” a corpse is again reanimated with a shock — not, initially, by a steampunk contraption as in the classic take on “Frankenstein” (and as in “Poor Things”) but by a bolt of lightning. It strikes the graveyard monument to a handsome Victorian fellow whom unpopular goth high schooler Lisa has a crush on, and what’s left of the young man rises from the grave and stumbles into her nearby house. After she cleans him up, he still looks pretty bad, missing an ear and a hand. But the off-brand tanning bed in her garage, a prize won by her popular cheerleader stepsister, has bad wiring and shocks its users. So Lisa uses it to shock more life into her undead former neighbor so that he is sentient and appears not so much dead as someone with a really unappetizing skin condition.
Clever little twists like the tanning bed animate this whole movie, the directorial debut of Zelda Williams (daughter of the late comedian-movie star Robin Williams) with a script by Diablo Cody (“Juno”). The film contains exactly the right number of twists, revenge killings by the put-upon and unpopular protagonist (Kathryn Newton), satire of high school circa 1989,1 and plot beats. Nobody can accuse Oscar-winner Cody of not knowing how to write a proper script, and this one has been polished to a fine sheen. It really moves along, as the reanimated dead person (the character never aquires a name) takes up the role of defending Lisa from threats with increasing levels of extreme prejudice.
Its first victim is Lisa’s cruel stepmother. Gen X nonconformists will identify hard with the scene where Lisa’s cruel stepmother (Jennifer Pierce Mathus) threatens to have Lisa diagnosed with mental illness and committed to a residential Program-with-a-capital-P, just because she is Different and Unpopular; they’ll cheer when the dead guy whomps the woman on the head with a 1980s-era cassette player. The second is a high school nerd whom you’d think would be a friend, but who in an early scene tries to take advantage of her. And so on. The plot developments come on, one after the other, like freight cars that have been precisely arranged and coupled in a train of events that produces a satisfying story.
It’s not a brilliant movie. Not subversive in the least, “Lisa Frankenstein” is quite content to be contained in its small-town milieu without ever threatening to overthrow it. The town will continue without pause when the story is complete, minus a few unsympathetic characters, that’s all. Last year’s teen comedy “Bottoms” was much more subversive, probably because it was executed by and about queer people and not successful Hollywood denizens. The performances are good — Cole Sprouse in the mute role of the reanimated corpse deserves special mention, not least because he communicates everything he needs to without any lines, and is funny and subtle throughout — but I think the movie would have benefitted from a couple of recognizable actors, particularly in the stepmother role. Kate McKinnon would have eaten that up.
Diablo Cody was born in 1979, so it’s a bit of a mystery why the film is explicity set in 1989 and not when she was in high school in the mid-to-late 90s.