The monster-genre mash is sort of a subgenre of its own now, it seems. Your Monster (now streaming on Max) takes the stuff of rom-coms and spices it up with bits of musicals and horror flicks, casting Melissa Barrera as the beauty who falls for the beast who’s been living in her closet since she was a kid – surely more than apt for the star of Scream and In the Heights, no? The movie is an ambitious debut for writer/director Caroline Lindy, using her 2019 short as the springboard for a goofy romp that perhaps tries to do a little too much.
The Gist: “Based on a true-ish story,” reads the opening title card, and that’s because Lindy was once dumped by her boyfriend while in the throes of serious illness and recovering from surgery. Not cool. And so poor Laura (Berrera) is in the hospital and Jacob (Edmund Donovan) is apparently jealous that her bedmate is cancer, so he ends it like a total cad. She lumbers after him through the hospital, dragging an IV buddy and wailing. Pathetic scene for all parties. Even worse, she has nowhere to live, and ends up back in her childhood home, but her mom isn’t around, a detail that the plot deems unimportant so it just gets dropped and forgotten like a squirrel turd in the forest. Gotta contrive to get Laura alone and lonely and adjacent to her old bedroom closet, you know. Anyway, we’re subject to a montage of Laura weeping, crying, bawling, snotting, huh-huh-huhhhhhhing and other sundry expressions of grief, until she hugs the Amazon guy against his will for bringing her yet another delivery of facial tissue.
Some things we should know about Laura: She’s an actress with big Broadway dreams. She and Jacob penned a musical together with the intention of casting her in the lead role. I mean, the character’s even named “Laurie.” Yet he’s producing and directing it without her, right now as we speak. You’d think she’d let it go and move on with her life, but doing this, the mature thing, wouldn’t make for much of a movie, so she shuffles sheepishly into the audition and flopsweats in front of Jacob so she can maintain her state of weepy desperation. Sure, she has legitimate entitlement for the musical, but she’s still in recovery and not up to fighting strength and one of those movie characters who chooses to fail to protect herself for the benefit of movie audiences everywhere.
One night Laura hears thumping noises upstairs and investigates and discovers that her childhood monster, Monster (Tommy Dewey) is still camped out in her closet. It makes sense, at least psychologically, considering her state of emotional regression. And so she howls like a toddler when confronted with this thing, which isn’t a giant purple snorklewhacker, but a slightly grubbier version of Belle’s leonine beau. He makes her tea, just to be nice, but then they become passive-aggressive roommates waging thermostat battles and wrestling over the TV remote. Laura loathes Monster and Monster loathes Laura, but then he recites Shakespeare – the romantic shit, not the dark Hamlet shit – and she gets a tingle. Meanwhile, Laura lands the understudy gig beneath it-girl star Jackie (Meghann Fahy) in Jacob’s production, for no logical reason beyond that end of the plot needing a little juice. Laura asks Monster to join her at the theater-cast Halloween party but he declines, until he sees her in a glammed-up Bride of Frankenstein getup. Is something happening here? Yeah – something weird.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Nobody has yet met the standards of zom-rom-com Shaun of the Dead. Ostensibly a satirical spin on Beauty and the Beast, Your Monster lands next to similar not-fully-blended not-very-smooth genre smoothies like Lisa Frankenstein and Warm Bodies.
Performance Worth Watching: Dewey’s take on the monster-who’s-actually-a-lover is the best part of the film – he’s light and amusing with a hint of whimsy and another hint of edginess. It also works to draw out the best from Barrera; the film’s best moments are when the two stars kindle a little rom-com chemistry.
Memorable Dialogue: Monster: “You can never lose me, Laura. I’m your monster.”
Sex and Skin: A sex scene without nudity, but with a couple shots illustrating how Laura apparently likes ’em more than a little bit fuzzy.
Our Take: Your Monster, with its multiple tonal/thematic/aesthetic pieces that don’t quite fit together, needs a strong lead character and performance to hold it together – but Barrera doesn’t quite pull it off, seemingly emphasizing Laura’s more needy and obnoxious qualities. The character as realized is too cartoonish to be plausible. On the page, Laura is flimsy and hollow; she has one friend, a wacky slutty-rom-com-bestie stereotype (Kayla Foster), there’s a passing mention of an absentee mother and she just can’t seem to stand on her own without Jacob in her life. That is, until Monster emerges from amongst the clothes and shoes and long-lost socks to rescue her, which sure is some peen-hammer-to-noggin irony.
Now, is Laura more upset about losing that douchenozzle Jacob or the cancer that just might be killing her? In fact, what does she think about the horrific existential threat she’s facing? You know, the nasty little cells that are devouring her from within? I don’t know. The script doesn’t seem particularly interested in that. There’s a scene late in the film in which Laura tries to explain her myriad crazy thoughts, actions and emotions, and the script chalks it all up to For Some Reason, and leaves it at that. Regarding the deeply illogical manner in which Laura’s leading her life, she simply says, “I can’t help it,” and we sigh in the face of a character too stupid and empty to be relatable. Now, this isn’t a call for her to be rendered as a you-go-girl feminist icon – which is just from a different aisle at the cliche store – but for the character to round herself out by discovering her resiliency. A little less whine and a little more spine would go a long way.
Our Call: Oh, and a few smirks and an occasional scattered laugh does not a comedy make. Lindy shows a lot of ambition conceptually, and that’s admirable, but Your Monster is begging for a rewrite. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.