Beneath its silliness and Lisa Frank shimmer, Zelda Williams’ Lisa Frankenstein examines death and the difficult task of overcoming it. When death preys upon your life, you lose your identity and who you once were – your life now splits into halves: the before and the after. For Lisa (Kathryn Newton), she finds herself sluggishly trudging through life in pursuit of something, anything to make her feel again. Nothing has any meaning, so she pulls away from her family and friends (if she had any) and instead finds solace in a nearby cemetery called Bachelors Grove. There, she enjoys the sunshine, the peace and the quiet, and turns to journaling and gravestone rubbings to pass her time. Other living people are the last things on her mind.
After a torrential downpour, Lisa, high on an accidental dose of PCP, wanders to the graveyard where she approaches her favorite gravestone, that of a young gentleman named Frankenstein. She wishes to be with him – that is, below the earth’s surface in the dirt and being eaten alive by maggots. And her wish comes true, in a way. A day later, the rigor mortis-stricken corpse (Cole Sprouse) revives from his grave and stalks her tracks, eventually making his way to her home where he hopes to woo her into his arms. Lisa initially freaks out; a monster has arrived on her doorstep, and she should be afraid, right?
But her fear soon washes away, just like the dirt and wiggling worms spiraling down the drain after Frankenstein takes a shower. He cleans up nicely, and Lisa makes him her pet project, even giving him some modern clothes. While Frankenstein can only grunt and grumble, Lisa completely understands and connects with him. It’s that “human” connection she’s so desperately needed since her mom died.
To recover from her tragedy – Lisa courts death in any manner she can, even if that means making friends with a literal dead man. Perhaps, it’s only through unapologetically confronting death that you can actually heal and find your light again. When my mom died almost three years ago, I didn’t think I could ever recover; there are days still that feel as though death is following in my shadow, lingering just out of view for its moment to pounce, much like Frankenstein. When death preys upon your life, and it will sooner or later, it’s always when you least expect it. You can never be ready for it, even if the signs have already imprinted themselves upon your life.
Lisa, whose mother died at the hands of an ax-wielding maniac, begins sharing parts of her life with this flesh-dripping dead man. As the two grow increasingly intimate, Lisa opens up about her mother’s death in ways she probably didn’t expect. In one of the film’s most emotional scenes, Frankenstein sits down at Lisa’s grand piano and begins playing ‘Can’t Fight This Feeling,’ which her father hadn’t played since his wife died. As the song crescendos, you get the impression that Lisa is finally admitting to and accepting her mother’s death. “I forgot what I started fighting for,” Lisa sings.
She holds back tears, but Frankenstein can not. His odorous tears streak down his decaying face, leaving Lisa disgusted in one hilarious bit. Believing his tears to be the result of killing Janet (Carla Gugino), Lisa comforts him and reminds him that she had it coming. But I’d like to believe that Frankenstein felt Lisa’s misery throbbing in her chest, and his valid emotional response was a way to manifest Lisa’s own ownership over the pain.
It’s much later that Lisa exposes her darkest thoughts about death in the film’s most important scene. “After my mom died, everyone was in such a hurry to go back to normal. And they kept acting like I had a problem ‘cause I couldn’t stop missing her,” she says. “Started to feel like I was going crazy. I thought that was going to last forever, but it didn’t.”
“And pretty soon everybody seemed like they were almost excited to move on and forget about her. They kept saying, ‘Time heals all wounds.’ But that’s a lie,” she continued. “Time is the wound. It takes you further and further from that place when you were happy.”
Ultimately, it’s the fear of death that elicits such cold and detached reactions. “People are so afraid of death… cause they don’t know when it’s going to happen to them. It could be an ax murderer, could be the flu, but they don’t know and they hate that. So. I’m not afraid of death anymore.”
As Lisa and Frankenstein’s relationship flourishes, so does Lisa’s confidence. In wearing Taffy’s (Liza Soberano) clothes as a form of expression, she learns to live again and finally move on from her mother’s death. Grief will always follow her around, but she manages to wrangle it in healthy ways. She lets her heart open again, which is probably why she falls in love with Frankenstein. He’s the only person she’s been able to confide in. He’s a refuge, a place where she can be her most authentic, weird self.
When it comes down to actually dying herself, Lisa does so without hesitation. In the finale, she climbs into Taffy’s tanning bed and shares a bittersweet moment with her Frankenstein, both of them practically in tears. It’s a heavy, harrowing beat in the film that gives it necessary weight. Lisa comes full circle with her speech earlier in the film, and it’s a glorious payoff. “I’m not afraid of death anymore” rings truer than she could ever have expected it to.
“Make sure you set it to max bronze,” she tells Frankenstein, in a move so she can truly be with him forever. The two share a final kiss, and the lid closes over Lisa’s body. In mere moments, the contraption lights on fire and burns her body into charcoal. A smile crosses her face just before. She’s accepted not only her own death but her place in life, her last moments alive flashing in her mind.
Her dying is worth all the living. From a mousy recluse to a bodacious lover, Lisa’s transformation is the glue that holds the film together. Director Zelda Williams coats the story with a Lisa Frank-approved veneer, references to The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Mary Shelley, and infectious campiness. Fortunately, it doesn’t bury the film’s darker moments. In fact, it accentuates them and makes the film far more profound than it otherwise would be.
Lisa Frankenstein is far more than a silly horror-comedy. It’s a mediation on death and how many of us become consumed by it. Without her Frankenstein, Lisa would likely have lived a very sad life, forever wandering through existence without meaning or purpose. Instead, Lisa lives a life worth living – even as she’s dying.
She’s no longer afraid and ashamed of her grief, death, or her own inevitable demise. She embraces every facet of existence and teaches us how and why to do the same. It’s through its painstaking commitment to its themes that has made me reflect upon my own journey. It’s been tiring but I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel.
While the film flopped in theaters, it’ll find its audience in the coming years and hopefully more people will discover its charm and needle-point precision in accepting the toughest part of life: death. And it might even change a few lives.
Lisa Frankenstein is now available on Digital at home.
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