‘Lisa Frankenstein’ (2024)

“Lisa Frankenstein” (2024) is a bad movie.

Objectively. Critics have said it wanders through genres, the characters have little dimension, the writing is lackluster, and the  references to the 1980s are overwhelming.

I think it’s perfect.

Written by Diablo Cody, who is known for such hits like “Juno” and “Jennifer’s Body,” the movie takes relatively little from its 200-year-old literary canon source material.

Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton) is self-absorbed, impulsive, idealistic, and hopelessly romantic; her locker’s lock is heart-shaped. She’s perfectly 18. She’s not happy to be on this earth and has an obsession with the gravestone of a man (Cole Sprouse) who died a hundred years earlier. 

Sprouse’s character, soon to be our story’s Creature, is reanimated due to a killer lightning storm. Undead chaos ensues. Now an undead part-Frankenstein/part-zombie, he tracks down Lisa in a hysterical home-intrusion scene. 

Lisa and the Creature quickly form a bond, and the Creature begins living in her closet. That is, until he kills Lisa’s ghastly step-mother for attempting to put her in a psych ward. Lisa and her Creature spend the rest of the movie hunting down and murdering those who have wronged Lisa. And, of course, falling in love.

In short, the movie is unhinged.

While one of the looser adaptations of “Frankenstein,” it truly embraces the spirit of the story. With the help of an electrically faulty tanning bed, Lisa and her monster undergo a transformation together. No, literally, Lisa sews missing body parts from the people they murdered together onto the monster. They also grow emotionally, as the Creature can’t talk, which gives awkward Lisa a space to do all the talking. Lisa flourishes and becomes more outgoing and violent as the monster becomes a real person.

The movie also bends  traditional “Frankenstein” adaptations by reconfiguring the personality of the protagonist. Lisa is more like Mary Shelley herself rather than Victor Frankenstein. Shelley learned to write using her mother’s gravestone; Lisa does a charcoal rubbing of the Creature’s last name on his grave and writes her name above it. Lisa is a seamstress, which is much closer to a writer than a scientist. Both Lisa and Shelley lost their mothers at young ages and became social outcasts. They both have an odd relationship with death, finding love and comfort in it. After all, at its core “Lisa Frankenstein” is a movie about grief and confronting death.

Unlike Mary Shelley,  Lisa overcomes the trauma of her mother’s death by becoming a killer. She is rewarded with a messy, undead, codependent Creature husband.

The Creature is a perfect metaphor for Lisa’s grief over her mother’s recent death. He mauls her troublesome peers with an axe, the same weapon her mother was killed with. And he isn’t given a penis until after they’ve slaughtered the two men who have wronged Lisa. 

In many ways, the film is a commentary on how society refuses to acknowledge individuals unless they fit all of society’s norms. Lisa is ignored by almost everyone throughout the movie, even her neighbors ignore her as she screamed during the home invasion scene. 

Lisa’s step-sister, Taffy (Liza Soberan), is the opposite. She’s perfect and beloved by everyone because of it. That is, until she’s trembling and walking away from a graveyard covered in blood having just been kidnapped by Lisa. A passing car doesn’t even glance at her.

There’s care and love and artistry throughout this movie. The neon lights and mash of 1980s themes aren’t a detriment, they’re what make the movie. The colors are reminiscent of dramatic stage lighting. The scene in which Lisa is drugged at a party, and the sequence of her losing her grip on reality are the most beautifully rendered ‘high’ scenes I’ve witnessed in modern media. The colors, the distortion, Isabella Summers & Elise McQueen’s rendition of “I Can See Clearly Now” — It’s perfect for the narrative of the movie.

Speaking of the movie’s narrative, it did wander quite a bit through genres. We got romance, comedy, slasher, and influence from Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” “Heathers” (1988). Sometimes the film  takes murder seriously (Lisa’s initial freakout when the Creature kills her step-mother), and at other times disregards the matter entirely (the Creature tosses a security guard that could get our loveable duo into legal trouble into an open grave, killing her instantly.) The movie’s genre is just as cobbled together as Lisa’s Creature, and the film is all the better for it.

Not to mention the animated sequences in the beginning and towards the end of the movie. They’re done in a 2-D almost paper-like black and white animation style and are wonderfully cartoonish. The first is the story of Creature when he was alive, his unlucky experiences with love, and ultimately death. The second is a representation of Lisa losing her virginity to the Creature, which takes the Creature’s style of animation and combines it with Lisa’s love of old movies and silent films. The one bad thing I can say about this movie is the penetration innuendo in the second sequence may have ruined my love of George Méliès’ Bullet-to-the-eye-of-the-moon scene.  

The agreement between critics is that“Lisa Frankenstein” leaves a little to be desired. This critique — while professionally satisfying — is not the ruler with which to accurately measure “Lisa Frankenstein.” Instead, we must ask ourselves, what was “Lisa Frankenstein” promising and what did it deliver?

Audiences were promised a comedy. A campy tale of murder and dramatic teenage-dom at its peak. A love story. And that’s exactly what we got. “Lisa Frankenstein” is what every unseen, unheard teenager (and young adult or monster-lover) needs. 

I left the theater thinking:  What did I just watch and when can I watch it again?