Lisa Frankenstein

Not only is screenwriter extraordinaire Diablo Cody (Juno, Jennifer’s Body, Young Adult) back in business after a longer hiatus, with Lisa Frankenstein she returns to the genre she so effortlessly dominates: quirky, offbeat coming-of-age tales. Released shortly after Birth/Rebirth and Poor Things gave their own feminist spins to the elements presented in Mary Shelley’s cult novel, Cody once again has her finger on the pulse of the time in her rendition of the Frankenstein saga.

After a terrible tragedy, teenager Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton) is forced to move in with her father (Joe Chrest), his new wife (Carla Gugino) and her daughter (Liza Soberano). Despite her stepsister’s best intentions to integrate her, Lisa is unable to bond with her peers and spends most of her days alone in an overgrown Victorian cemetery. During a thunderstorm, Lisa’s lament somehow gets mistaken for an incantation from the other side, and the young man, whose grave she’s been sitting on, is raised from the dead. In this living corpse (Cole Sprouse), Lisa finds the connection that has hitherto eluded her.

The scenarios are so deliberately over the top and ludicrous, it comes as a great disappointment that for the greater part of the film, the humour doesn’t translate to screen. Perhaps this is attributable to a certain inexperience, as this marks Zelda Williams’s directing debut. A number of risqué scenes are downright concealed by quick cutaways in the edit and a love scene, rather than being played out with the actors, is illustrated and culminates in a cheap-looking drawing of a rocket. These decisions come across as cowardly in such a bonkers film full of sexual entendre and violence, and it begs the question of why an intimacy coach is even listed in the credits if there is no intimacy to speak of.

With his character unable to speak, Sprouse emphasises the physical comedy propagated by silent-film actors and, by fully committing to a camp performance, he excels. Newton on the other hand seemed to struggle to get the tone right and her shifts in different scenes felt abrupt.

Lisa Frankenstein operates with a colourful 80s aesthetic, which can symbolise a place of longing for the disenfranchised millennial, but the Gen Z target audience is not known for looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses and likely would have preferred a modern setting.

Fans of modern teen horror such as Totally Killer or Warm Bodies might be able to have a blast with this, but the general public will have little use for this messy misfit feature.

Selina Sondermann

Lisa Frankenstein is released nationwide on 1^st March 2024.

Watch the trailer for Lisa Frankenstein here: