Meanwhile, Lisa faces struggles of her own. Her stepmother, Janet, is supremely mistrustful of her, and threatens to send her off to a psychiatric institution, presumably so that she can better maintain the pretense of having a perfect family unit with her new husband Dale (Joe Chrest) and her pageant-winning daughter Taffy (Liza Soberano). Although it is the Creature who ultimately dispatches Janet—blunt force head trauma courtesy of Lisa’s hefty sewing machine—Lisa is quick to hop on board, helping the Creature bury the body, sewing Janet’s ear onto his head, and seemingly developing a taste for murder herself. When the Creature expresses a desire for a new hand, Lisa’s quick to choose the perfect donor, getting revenge on the boy from school who groped her with that same hand at a party. He sought to assert his dominance over her, and was met with Lisa’s flaming sword—or rather, ax—of retribution. It’s also no coincidence that the boy who spurns her in favor of her stepsister ends up murdered and missing a certain appendage. Lisa’s furious at the world for the injustices it has delivered upon her, and the people who attempt to control her life or interfere with her plans have a tendency to end up dead. In both Bella and Lisa’s cases, their reactions are so extreme because they have so much to lose by allowing others to have power over them. They refuse to be vulnerable—instead, they take action.
The dynamic between Creator and Creation is one of the key relationships in “Frankenstein,” and in “Poor Things” and “Lisa Frankenstein,” Bella and Lisa occupy both roles. Bella is reanimated against her will as a baby in the body of an adult woman, forced to go through the stages of human development at warp speed. She begins the film with no agency—not even her death is respected. But over the course of “Poor Things,” she claws back power over her own life, first by running away with Duncan against her father figure Godwin “God” Baxter’s (Willem Dafoe) wishes, then by carving out an independent life for herself in Paris. But her true act of supreme agency comes when she herself becomes a creator—she refuses to accept her old life as the wife of the sadistically cruel Alfie Blessington, and uses God’s laboratory to replace his brain with that of a goat, allowing her freedom at last as the new god of her dominion.
By contrast, “Lisa Frankenstein” works in reverse. Lisa starts out as a creator, accidentally serving as the catalyst (along with a mysterious green lightning storm) for the Creature’s resurrection after leaving her mother’s rosary at his grave. She continues to fill that role throughout the film, repeatedly reanimating the Creature with Taffy’s malfunctioning tanning bed, each time after sewing on new limbs for him. Each of these times she operates as a facilitator for his agenda, giving him back the specific parts that he wants to reclaim. It’s only when she makes the decision to become a Creation—allowing herself to die in a fiery tanning bed accident and then be brought back to life in the same way the Creature was—that she is fully in control of her destiny. In the final scene, Lisa has come full circle, with the Creature serving as her resurrector, as she requested of him.