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The synopsis for Lisa Frankenstein does not exactly paint an accurate picture of what the film is. It’s not about a girl who seeks to build the perfect boyfriend, and in a way that description feels dismissive to what the film is truly about. It’s the story of a girl grappling with grief and trying to make sense of her world after it gets blown apart as a result of a tragic murder. The film is not all doom and gloom, it is darkly comedic and a lot of fun until the third act where it takes a bizarre left turn into reality that does not gel with the rest of the film.
Lisa Frankenstein follows Lisa (Kathryn Newton) who is morbidly obsessed with death (though probably closer to truly suicidal than goth as the description implies) after she witnesses the murder of her mother. She moves with her father (Joe Chrest) in with his new family (Carla Gugino and Liza Soberano) when a freak storm reanimates a corpse (Cole Sprouse) with whom Lisa forms an unlikely friendship and romance.
The movie has a lot of things that work well for it. The performances are great across the board and a lot of the characters are either fleshed out in a way that makes them feel like either more than an archetype or just an archetype but it's okay because they are filling a very specific role and don’t need to be expanded on further. Kathryn Newton continues to show herself to be a fantastic character actress with an interesting range and Cole Sprouse has some great opportunities to do some dialogue-less physical comedy. Much like Bottoms or any number of horror movies, Lisa Frankenstein has its own internal rules and logic for the world that make sense within its own confines but not to the real world.
It is that worldbuilding that is ultimately the downfall of the third act. The film spends around three-quarters of the movie living in this unreal space, however, the ending attempts to ground it in a truly unsettling fashion, and not unsettling in a good way. Because the movie does not operate with any sense of real world logic up until the third act, making characters suddenly act human and have real human reactions to the events transpiring does not line up with the world set up until that point. Yes there are a bunch of murders, but up until the third act it appears that this is a world where there aren’t going to be consequences for it (and the victims are set up as irredeemable antagonists so the viewer is not upset watching them get killed). Once you get to a sequence where a character is in a prolonged trauma response after witnessing a murder, immediately cut to a joke that may include another homicide, and then cut back to that same traumatized character, it breaks up the flow. Had the movie played with the possibility that the corpse was not really reanimated and it was all some kind of hallucination by Lisa, maybe that ending would have worked but within the plot as established, the third act falls apart.
Third act issues aside, the movie is entertaining enough to warrant a watch. The performances are fun, the production design and costumes are great, and there is enough positive with the movie to warrant a viewing, even if it is something one waits until it hits streaming to view because there is nothing in the film that particularly necessitates seeing it in theaters.
Final Rating: 7/10
