That was the best screenplay I've ever seen in my whole life

So lately there’s been this idea I’ve become completely obsessed with. It’s like there are these films that do something so innovative within a genre that they communicate a truth about life that far surpasses anything else that’s ever been done in the language of cinema before them. And yet these innovations seem counterintuitive, or at the very least like they wouldn’t be the first thing the writer thought of to convey a story in the style of the given genre it emulates. 

 

In Lisa Frankenstein (2024, Zelda Williams), there are quite a few instances wherein its screenplay brings a jolt of life to the gothic teen romance genre. Foremost among these is the way its protagonist’s arc shows her not only eventually embodying everything she would seem to be in opposition to (something like a shallow, selfish, slutty mean girl), but also introducing a love interest who in turn takes up her former role: the hopeless romantic outcast loner. Yeah I know that sounds like the arc of the guy in Can’t Buy Me Love (1987, Steve Rash), except there the love interest doesn’t become everything Ronald Miller was in the trade off/reversal way we get here.

     And then there’s the way the couple first meet. One would think LISA SWALLOWS (Kathryn Newton) is in love with FRANKENSTEIN (Cole Sprouse), and when she brings him to life her dreams have come true. But Diablo Cody’s screenplay instead does the contrary: it subverts our expectations by having Lisa accidentally bring Frankenstein to life through the mixup of her wishing she could be dead and him perceiving her to have meant she wished to bring him back to life so that she could be with him. And it’s emotionally brutal. She’s not into him at all. Never was. And this inciting incident sets into place Frankenstein now having become the hopeless romantic outcast reject Lisa was. Now I’m in the story. Now that feels more true to life and even more true to the gothic romance genre. 

     The other thing is how excessively dark Lisa’s backstory is, which also happens to lead to a very vague probably not at all intentional or seen by anyone else buy me half-baked theory I have. Presented as a flashback told by her step-sister Taffy, supposedly one night when Lisa and her mom were home alone a masked intruder broke in and murdered her mom; and yet the dad seems to meet and happily fall in love with Taffy’s mom 6 months later. Obviously the tonal shift here is meant to be shockingly funny—and it is. But when I weighed up how the dad doesn’t seem to care at all when either of his wives and his daughter all die (the Fuddrucker’s line), this kinda makes me feel like maybe he’s a predator. 

     And in closing, Taffy’s end of the telephone conversation with the investigator trying to get clues about her mom’s disappearance has gotta be the funniest moment in the movie, and is some of the best gag writing around.

02/09/2024 

AMC Madison Yards 8

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