As anyone who has ever been a high schooler knows, finding your tribe can make or break your experience. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), Lisa Swallows feels more at home with the dead than the living.
Lisa’s interest in death is less of an obsession than it is a passion borne out of tragic necessity. After her mother was brutally murdered by an ax-wielding intruder, it didn’t take long for everyone in her life to move on. With her father remarried, Lisa finds herself in a new town, stuck under the thumb of her cruel stepmother, at the whim of her well-meaning, if a bit flighty, stepsister, and feeling like an outcast amidst a sea of fizzy, poppy 1980s teens.
The only respite Lisa has from the stumbling awkwardness of her day-to-day life is her time spent in a graveyard, doting on a stone monument built to a tragically handsome young man who died young and alone. After a party gone wrong, Lisa flees to the tombstone and confesses that she longs to be with the young man in the ground. She means she wishes she were dead. Fate, however, misunderstands her.
“Lisa Frankenstein” is inspired by Mary Shelley’s seminal horror novel, but updates the time period to 1989 and turns Dr. Frankenstein into a teenage girl desperate for connection. First time feature filmmaker Zelda Williams teams up with screenwriter Diablo Cody to gift audiences a delightfully macabre world offset by the glitter and cheese of the 1980s. While it feels like the zaniness of Cody’s script can sometimes get away from Williams as a filmmaker, she clearly has an eye for the bizarre that she’s able to neatly stitch up with a genuinely swoon-worthy teen romance.
After Lisa (Kathryn Newton) makes her fateful wish, a wayward lightning strike brings the dead object of her affections (Cole Sprouse, simply billed as “The Creature”) back to life. Thinking Lisa is the architect of his resurrection, he stumbles to her home in search of his new love. After a rocky start – and despite some missing appendages on The Creature’s part – the two begin to bond, and later start to look for ways to reassemble his rotting corpse.
Kathryn Newton has already proven herself a great addition to the horror comedy canon with movies like “Freaky,” and her talents prove themselves again here. The arc of Lisa’s relationship with The Creature is reflected not just through Newton’s ever-changing wardrobe, but her physicality as well. The relationship between them doesn’t start off romantic (however much The Creature might wish it was), but rather built on a foundation of something Lisa’s never been able to find among her living peers whose mothers have not been slain by an axe murderer – understanding.
However much her stepsister Taffy (a scene-stealing Liza Soberano) tries her best to take Lisa under her wing, she doesn’t quite get her misfit new sister. That lack of understanding keeps Lisa closed off and quiet. But when it comes to The Creature, she can talk to him about anything – and being dead himself, he’s not afraid of her more morbid thoughts. As that kinship starts to give Lisa confidence, Newton opens up physically, her rigidity relaxing into something undeniably cool, her romantic swooning taking on a whole new level of camp. Having someone who gets her – who will protect her from evil stepmothers and bask in the delights of REO Speedwagon with her whenever she wants – gives her the confidence to take on the world.
While Newton might hold the screen, Cody’s script is the real star of “Lisa Frankenstein.” Though not quite as sensitive as “Juno” or razor sharp as “Jennifer’s Body,” Cody’s off-kilter cadence and penchant for a hilariously frank comic delivery can be found all over the film. As Lisa’s stepmother Janet (a name that’s perfect fodder for a wonderfully on theme “Rocky Horror” joke), Carla Gugino takes on this tone with gusto – “No one coddled me when my dad was blown up in Da Nang,” she snipes in reference to how Lisa is handling her mother’s untimely demise.
This black, often violent humor is offset against the film’s specific combination of dark Victorian romance and undeniable 80s fizz. One of the film’s best moments is a dream sequence featuring Lisa dressed up like the Bride of Frankenstein herself (with a Pabst Blue Ribbon twist), the black and white backdrop looking like something straight out of German expressionist film. Lisa’s room is a combination of bright pink walls and floral patterns, littered with movie posters that include “The Mummy” starring Boris Karloff and “Creature From the Black Lagoon.” The movie’s climax, which includes the film’s most violent act, features a sight gag involving a shadow that is one of the funnier things I’ve seen this year. While there are moments when it feels like the mixture of all these tones can’t quite come together for a pitch perfect satire in the way something like 1988’s “Heathers” is able to achieve, Williams clearly has a unique sense of how to bring the bizarre to life on screen in a way that makes me excited to see what she does next.