The story of a shy teenage girl who comes out of her shell after raising the boy of her dreams from the dead sounds like a job for the Tim Burton of yore. And yet, Lisa Frankenstein’s strengths are so specific to a weirdo female gaze that even the certified freak who made Beetlejuice would’ve failed to deliver on the potential of this film’s premise.
Diablo Cody’s script—operating on the same wicked, smirking wavelength as her now-cult classic Jennifer’s Body—is absolutely fearless in chasing the darkest implications of this story to its bitter end. The film gleefully lets its body count—in both the homicidal and sexual sense of the term, sometimes in the same scene—add up in gruesome, macabre fashion.
Getting there, though, is somewhat rough. Just as Lisa (Kathryn Newton) can’t seem to connect with the world around her at first, Zelda Williams’s direction has trouble finding its footing in the world that Cody has created: a nondescript suburb in 1989 where most kids appear to be hostile jocks or big-haired cheerleaders, and all the adults are jocks and cheerleaders who never left town. Aside from some choice ’80s needle drops, the beautifully animated opening credits, and the wonderful score by Florence and the Machine keyboardist Isabella Summers, the film’s deliberate, glacial pacing early on doesn’t quite give us enough to latch onto.
Lisa, at this point, is largely defined by her quiet, mostly unassuming hobbies: reading, making rubbings at a local, abandoned graveyard, and muttering to her favorite Victorian-era dead guy’s grave. Of course, she has her reasons, chief among them the murder of her mother by a serial killer, after which her father (Joe Christ) married an evil Stepford wife (Carla Gugino).
Things get worse for Lisa during a party where she gets her drink spiked and her sister, Taffy (a Stepford wife-in-training played to the hilt by Liza Soberano), is nowhere to be found as a shrill-voiced nerd tries to grope our heroine. It’s one thing to kick a character when she’s down, but the opening act of Lisa Frankenstein comes a little too close to crossing the line into downright sad, and in a way that threatens to smother even the frequent laughs of Cody’s script.
Williams’s film finds its bearings after a wayward wish and a freak lightning storm bring Lisa’s favorite dead Victorian (Cole Sprouse) to life. Newton’s initially mousy, nondescript performance shifts gears, turning Lisa into a swooning, bloodthirsty, necrophiliac goth queen. The actress has always managed to bring something dangerous to even her smallest roles—it takes a special performer to bring an unnatural, Cronenbergian horror performance to a Pokémon movie—but her embodiment of Lisa is something special, less vamping than sardonic, quick-tempered, deservedly selfish, and astonishingly, almost distressingly horny.
Lisa’s sick love affair turns homicidal as she realizes that her sister’s malfunctioning tanning bed is just as effective as Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory at bringing the dead back to life. Williams’s direction, in turn, revels in every ghastly detail of a handsome corpse’s rotting body infecting everything and everyone in town with gore, filth, and vermin. All the while, Sprouse’s wonderful physical performance—think Boris Karloff by way of Edward Scissorhands—conveys Lisa’s new consort’s perpetually broken heart through little more than well-placed groans and gentle looks.
Somehow, through all the horror and vile effluvia that defines Lisa and her beau’s rampage through town, Lisa Frankenstein never forgets it’s a coming-of-age tale of puppy love between two outcasts, full of betrayal, hormonal outbursts, gossipy classmates, and unrequited crushes. Even as the film revels in violent, necrophiliac delights, Cody’s dialogue, as divisively idiosyncratic as ever, keeps everything grounded with its humor.
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