For several decades, teenage love stories have featured vampires (Twilight, Buffyetc.) and zombies (the cute Warm Bodies by Jonathan Levine). While Mary Shelley’s masterpiece is cinematically hot (all fresh Poor Things by Yorgos Lanthimos, the highly anticipated Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro), it was time to look at the creature of the evil (or visionary?) doctor. And who better than the screenwriter Diablo Cody to put the hand, the brain and other pieces at the service of this dough of which is made Lisa Frankenstein !
“Hell is a teenager. » Those could have been the first words of this film. These are those of Jennifer’s Bodydirected by Karyn Kusama based on the work of the screenwriter of Juno. Released in 2009, this black, feminist and horror comedy starring Megan Fox was received mixed (because it was poorly understood and poorly promoted), but has now become cult.
More clearly marketed (understand: this is a film for teenagers), Lisa Frankenstein by Zelda Williams (yes, Robin’s daughter, in a convincing debut behind the camera) undeniably bears the signature of Diablo Cody. The characters are just right off the mark, the humor is very dark, the adults complicitly lean towards caricature, sexuality is not shy (or elsewhere), the girls are solid in both qualities and defects, the mix of genres is balanced, the subtext is (im)relevant. And through it all, a killer soundtrack with pop / rock / indie accents.
Uprooted
The year is 1989. Lisa, played intelligently by Kathryn Newton (at Marvel, the daughter of Ant-Man), is uprooted. New house. New family. New college. Her father (Joe Chrest, deliberately beige) met Janet (Carla Gugino, perfectly neon). They got married. And here is the teenager with a hypocritical stepmother and a “sister” (Liza Soberano) who is as popular as she is kind (a rarity in the world of this type of story).
Lonely, Lisa-not-yet-Frankenstein takes refuge in the abandoned cemetery to read near a young man who died in 1837 whose life, according to his tombstone, can be summed up in one word. Unmarried. Love at first sight here… falling straight to the grave. And the dead man (Cole Sprouse, who in another life lived in Riverdale) to get up to join Lisa-soon-Frankenstein. Because this ersatz ofEdward Scissorhands. The teenager will provide them to him, finding her raw material on bad people because of whom she saw red. With her skills as a seamstress and a faulty tanning bed as tools. This gives an idea of the tone: here, gore or gross; there, the absurd and the hilarious.
Behind the camera, Zelda Williams manages to give cohesion to these seemingly mismatched pieces. Cole Sprouse learned from a mime to “express himself” without words and to move like a zombie. Yes, it works (slowly, it had to). As for Kathryn Newton, she is very credible in her obligatory transformation, going from self-effacing girl to, your choice, Madonna of the late 1980s or Wednesday of today. To liven it all up, a chemistry to wake the dead unites the two actors, while their relationship evolves to the rhythm of the clichés of the romantic comedy. This, in the vibrant colors of the 1990s. With a predilection for red (blood/love) and black (Victorian/gothic).