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Director:Zelda Williams
Writer:Diablo Cody
Stars:Kathryn NewtonLiza SoberanoJenna Davis
Lisa Frankenstein Full Movie Review
Ever since Mary Shelley wrote “Frankenstein” at age 19, it has functioned as a remarkably versatile Rorschach test, prescient in ways its author could hardly have anticipated. Usually it’s interpreted as a story about hubris, about man playing God and reaping the consequences. But you can just as easily read it as a lucid explication of Rousseau’s ideas about human nature, or as a slippery narrative told by a not-quite-reliable narrator who’s trying to get away with murder.
On the other hand, Guillermo del Toro, one of our greatest contemporary horror directors, has “Frankenstein” as “the quintessential teenage book,” full of angst and curiosity about becoming an adult. And though he wasn’t talking about “Lisa Frankenstein” specifically, he might as well have been. Shelley’s novel lends itself well to teen horror-comedy, and the screenwriter Diablo Cody — who wrote “Juno” and “Jennifer’s Body,” as well as the book for the youth-focused “Jagged Little Pill” Broadway show — seized on that angle. The result is a very, very loose adaptation of “Frankenstein” that doesn’t draw on much from the original. Directed by Zelda Williams in her feature debut, this is instead the familiar story of a loner finding love in an unlikely place.
Perhaps you spent the late 1980s and early ’90s doing something other than being a school-age girl. So it’s worth noting that the title of the film is a nod to a company, named for its founder, that produced brightly colored stickers with characters like unicorns and kittens and bears that eventually made their way to the broader school supply set. (In grade school circa 1992, my friends and I yearned for Lisa Frank Trapper Keepers, the true marker of cool.)
You can kind of see where this is going: The 19th-century dead guy is not going to stay that way. One night, he rises (played, in suitably ghastly makeup, by Cole Sprouse), and they fall in love. Lisa has never met such a gentlemanly boy — the fact that he doesn’t really talk doesn’t hurt — and she starts, at last, to feel understood.
Cody gets a little subversive with it all — Lisa’s stepsister, Taffy, for instance, is not at all what this kind of movie usually serves up, and that feels refreshing. But the rest is pretty predictable from the start, and so it starts to wear a little thin after a while, a title in search of a story. Even with all of the John Hughes DNA here, the characters are more one-dimensional. Williams’s directorial timing lags, undercutting the wit that Newton and Soberano bring to their characters. And I’m not sure if I’m supposed to feel sympathy for Lisa and her love interest, but the mishmash of references starts to get in the way.
