Quick Synopsis: A misunderstood teenager and a reanimated Victorian corpse embark on a murderous journey together to find love, happiness, and a few missing body parts.

I was looking forward to this. I’m not gonna lie, that was mainly because of Kathryn Newton. I absolutely LOVED her in Freaky, and I thought she was one of the best things about Quantumania. I’m unsure as to whether I like Diablo Cody or not. I loved Juno and Jennifer’s Body, but even then in those I was aware of how overly written and stylized the dialogue was.

If you’re on the fence about Cody, this won’t push you towards being a supporter of her. The dialogue is still overly painful to listen to at times, and she feels like she’s holding back a bit. The violence feels incredibly sanitized, which makes me think the studio wanted to lower the rating at the last minute, or they’re planning to release an unrated version later. It’s not just the violence, the dialogue also suffers from a general sense of “edited for television”. And that’s before you listen to the words being said and realise how overly hipster and fake the characters sound. This would be easier to deal with if the characters were likeable. As you can guess by that previous sentence, they’re not. What made Juno work was how relatable and real the characters felt, even when the dialogue was a bit naff. You don’t get that here. There’s also a stunning lack of consistency in characterisation, Lisa in particular seems to change personalities more than me when I’m creating a Sim in that video game where Sims do things in their Sim house, speaking Simlish and living with other Sims (I think it’s called The House That Keeps Burning Down). There’s a way to make it so characters can kill people and still make them likeable. Lisa Frankenstein doesn’t bother with that. As such, there’s a feeling that somewhere there’s another 10 minutes of LF which helps bridge the gap and makes their actions feel more real. As it is, it’s essentially “You killed my stepmother? Well let’s bury her and I’ll sew her ear to your face”. Yes, the stepmother was a bitch, but it still seems like they missed a few steps in making her death feel deserved. Especially since the creature was hiding in a cupboard, and was established as not being able to hear that well, so do we know for certain that he actually heard what she said? Doug was a sex pest so his death would have been much more cathartic. Doug does die, but not for much longer into the film than he should. I feel he should have been explored more, not explained or justified, he’s a date rapist. But he only appears in like two scenes, flesh out that character as a supposed “nice guy” then his rapey tendencies (and taking advantage of a drugged woman IS rape, and it’s weird how that is a controversial statement) would come off as more shocking and would allow an instant death.

Now on the bright side; it looks fucking fantastic. Kathryn Newton’s wardrobe is like someone sitting on a thumbtack; it’s on point. Hard to believe this is Zelda Williams’ feature-length directorial debut. I see in her what everybody else sees in Tim Burton. There’s a beautiful gothic elegance to a lot of the scenes, especially the opening which reminded me a Lotte of the work of Reiniger (possibly the most dated reference I will ever make). That gothic style meshes well with the 80s setting, everything feels oversaturated to the point where it seems to drain all sense of fun out of the colours. It’s stunning, showing great potential for her as a director, but it is a shame she will never get a chance to mesh her visual style with her dad’s acting style.

And now I’m sad.

Oh, and the music is good too. So overall, I’m not angry at this film, I’m disappointed. It’s too difficult to truly like and enjoy this film. Visually it has an identity, but in terms of story etc it just comes off as a parody that’s taking itself far too seriously.