Lisa Frankenstein: Coming of Rage

Lisa Frankenstein is getting generally bad reviews, and everyone knows why. Sure, people give all the usual excuses: pacing, script, blah blah blah blah blah. But the real reason that reviewers (who are, let’s face it, predominantly straight and male —especially within this genre) are really latching onto this this film, the reason they really need it to become the dud that it isn’t, is because it’s adapted from a script that was written by a woman, it was directed by a woman, the monster is played by a guy from a soap, and it features a lead who is both (you guessed it) a woman and also a monster herself.

And now you’re thinking: oh bliss. Another shrill ass feminist misandrist. But look at all this good shit I’m about to lay out and then maybe go check out the film, alright? 

The Script:

Diablo Cody is a genius. The woman won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay, the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay, and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay, amidst a whole bunch of other shit. Her teenagers alternate between speaking like actual kids (when they’re being embarrassed by adults, when they’re confronted by their peers, when they’re feeling insecure) and laying out verbal quips and profundities (when they’re confident, comfortable with their surroundings, or in a position of power) with the flow of Jane Austen and Quentin Tarantino having a rap battle, and these alterations in diction were intentionally crafted to reflect their psychological state. These are rhythms: not lapses in talent. The plot is so tight that you couldn’t run a hair through the cracks. 

This script allows us to understand that the Hot Academic boy that Lisa fancies is nowhere near as intelligent as he would like us to believe. He constantly misuses ‘complex’ words — like ethanol and profundity— without really understanding what they mean and using the confusion this generates in his (female) audience to feel smug and infantalise them. 

Diablo has presented Taffy in such a way that this sweet, dim, cheerleader (who can be bitchy, but who aims her bitchiness at appropriate targets) that we see her, at first, in the same dismissive way that Lisa does (because we expect her to be horrible) thereby allowing our understanding of who she’s always been to change alongside Lisa’s. 

The Creature doesn’t get many spoken lines (his character shows, though. In a big way. More on that in a minute) but the few he has really, truly count. They have impact. 

Lisa mutters at home, but is funny and quippy, and deeply vulnerable with the people that she trusts. 

And the villains. Oh boy.

Our perspective changes about everyone (with one single exception) as the film progresses. The sweet, nerdy guy (who looks and talks like the star of Revenge of the Nerds) turns out to be a perpetrator of sexual assault. Like (come to think of it) the lead character in the aforementioned teen comedy. The Hot Academic we mentioned above is revealed to be a raging misogynist. And then there is Janet. 

Janet is literally the only character in this film who doesn’t reveal herself to be anything beyond what she appears to be, and dear God I love that for her. She’s a psychiatric nurse who uses slurs against her patients, day drinks, casually abuses her stepdaughter, and absolutely deserves to get walloped with a sewing machine and have her ear cut off as the body parts start getting harvested.

The Director:

Aside from the numerous delicious nods and references to the major staples of classic horror (and the best of the surviving silents, let’s not forget those), this director made some choices that are absolutely brilliant. The scenes are framed in such a way that the angles shift along with the story. We open with a very Tim Burton/Edward Gorey illustrated introduction to the origins of The Creature. Then we get a Victorian Gothic scene involving overgrown tombstones and taking wax rubbings from graves, before diving into a 1980’s teen comedy feel, as we approach the lead (looking *very* gawky and innocent with bright, badly applied makeup), approaching her through the mirror. The camera moves from a straight shot, during the illustrated intro, as though we were reading the story in a book that’s held up to our faces, to a much lower side angle as we approach the cemetery, so that we seem to be skittering through the vines, and then back up as the angle turns so that we are facing Lisa through the mirror — essentially looking at ourselves. 

The whole film is like this. Every choice is intentional, every choice conveys something. Look at the way the camera moves in the love sequence, the way that our perspective shifts. Look at that awkward, horrific, hilarious, and phenomenally brutal penis scene when Lisa finds her sister in bed with her crush and that severed member floats, gracefully, through the air, to the saccharine strains of ‘On The Wings of Love’, to land in the trash bucket by the floor. 

And please keep your eyes open during the ‘Can’t Fight This Feeling’ scene. Trust me. There’s a moment that snagged my heart like a fishhook. 

‘You had a whole life’. 

The Acting:

Oh boy, the acting. Kathryn Newton is charming, blunt, awkward and absolutely, in every way, entrancing. Be still, my queer heart. Lisa’s body language shifts, depending on her comfort. From the blank affect she directs towards Taffy and Janet (gray rocking, at its finest) to her gawky flirting with her crush, to the way her shoulders curl in as she sort of shrinks down when she’s being mocked by her boss, to the casual way that she plays with The Creature’s hair while they’re conversing in bed, she’s always on point and she’s always, always luminous. 

Cole Sprouse is a tremendous actor. His role was, as I mentioned, largely silent, so everything had to be conveyed via facial expressions (difficult, through latex, but superbly achieved by this actor) and body language, so everything depended on his ability to convey story through his body. And holy hell did he ever pull it off. The way that (even in his most zombified state) he always swerves to the piano, as though he can’t resist the temptation of the keys, his visible frustration about the limitations of his body (he’s, after all, a musician who is missing an ear and a hand: that’s a very special kind of hell indeed), and obviously the way that everything about him loosens up (figuratively, as well as literally) whenever he’s around Lisa were brilliantly conveyed. 

Carla Gugino makes for a scintillating villain. She’s a quiet, sweet church lady who says something cutting over coffee. She’s Nurse Ratchet mixed with a Stepford Wife. She was absolutely pitch perfect. 

And then there is Taffy. Poor, sweet, traumatized Taffy. 

Liza Soberano was one of the standouts of this film. I’ve never seen niceness depicted like this. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen such sustained, genuine kindness carried, so perfectly, across the entire length of a film. She’s stupid, and occasionally misspeaks abysmally (allowing our perception of her to shift) but Soberano peels her layers back like the skin of an onion, revealing some incredible depths. 

This is, in every way, a hilarious, heartfelt, incredible film.