LISA FRANKENSTEIN - Mark Reviews Movies

Lisa Frankenstein, Focus Features

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 8, 2024

Things just sort of happen in Lisa Frankenstein, or at least, that's the sensation of this momentum-less dark comedy about a teenage girl who unintentionally resurrects the corpse of a century-old bachelor. It revolves around one character so formless that she changes with the whims of screenwriter Diablo Cody's plot and another who cannot speak, because he's a dead body brought back to life without a tongue. Neither grounds this material in any significant way, because it ultimately feels as if Cody has simply challenged herself to combine a string of eccentric and grisly ideas without considering how those elements should come together.

At first, we're dealing with a pretty ordinary 17-year-old who doesn't feel as if she belongs. She's Lisa (Kathryn Newton, doing what she can), who finds herself in a new town, at a new school, and with a mostly new family after her mother's death. It's not just any death, by the way. Lisa's mother was brutally murdered by a masked intruder in flashback that comes across as if a slasher movie happening off-screen. We also learn the killer escaped, never to be found, and if that sounds like the setup for a story or for some later revelation, it's not. It's just another stray piece of the movie's macabre but shapeless puzzle.

Anyway, Lisa is miserable. Her father's new wife Janet (Carla Gugino) is like a 1980s suburban version of a wicked stepmother out of a fairy tale, and Dale (Joe Chrest), the dad, is so inattentive and useless that he might as well have been killed, too. The only bright spot of Lisa's home life is her stepsister Taffy (Liza Soberano), a popular cheerleader whose efforts to be sisterly go right over Lisa's glum head.

Otherwise, Lisa spends her time as a loner at school or haunting an abandoned cemetery in the woods near her house. One grave has attracted her attention, and it belongs to a man whose name has mostly worn off from the tombstone. The man seemed to have no one in life, and in death, he has been forgotten. Lisa doesn't like the idea, so she tends the grave, leaves behind flowers, and even rests her mother's rosary on the grave marker. After a party where she accidentally downs a spiked drink and is sexually assaulted by an awkward but sinister guy, Lisa finds herself at the grave and wishes she could be with the dead stranger.

That wish and an apparently magical lightening strike resurrect the dead man, credited as "the Creature" and played by Cole Sprouse. He turns up at Lisa's house, makes a mess of breaking in, and eventually convinces the teen he means her no harm. It was all a misunderstanding, though, since Lisa was just wishing she was dead, but now, she has to hide a reanimated corpse from her family.

Whatever the joke of the premise is meant to be here is uncertain. Initially, that's because the setup we expect—that Lisa has some kind morbidly vague feelings for the romantic ideal of this man—is quickly tossed aside. Later, it's because the gag becomes something else entirely, only for the final point to return to that first notion. There's a level of uncertainty that goes beyond the plot and the point, too. Director Zelda Williams, probably as unclear about the script's intentions and purpose as we are, never establishes a firm tone for the material, but who can blame the filmmaker, really, when the whole thing is so malleable?

For whatever reason, hiding the sentient corpse gives Lisa a boost of confidence. She starts dressing in black and eccentric ensembles, talking to her crush (played by Henry Eikenberry), and acting as if she doesn't care that everyone at school thinks she's a weirdo. Her and the story's real purpose eventually arrives when the Creature violently stands up for Lisa, leaving behind the real deal of a corpse and, if the deaths continue, an opportunity for the Creature to have some of his missing appendages reattached.

Some of the jokes (Cody's penchant for pop-culture-infused dialogue hits at times without seeming like shallow nostalgia) and the quirky details (The use of a tanning bed in the way of a mad scientist is kind of inspired) work, and Newton's energetic performance is notable, although sometimes as too much of a stark contrast to the little energy the movie possesses. That's even true when Lisa Frankenstein finds the footing of its plot and ghoulish humor, as a series of killings and dismemberments are treated as half-hearted horror. Even when it knows what it wants to do, the movie seems uncertain about how to do so.

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