A clever comedy about learning to love your dark side, writer-director Caroline Lindy’s Beauty and the Beast coded rom-com-horror-musical Your Monster is one of the most entrancing and original movies of the year. While it displays a handful of debut feature jitters, Your Monster is one of those movies that just gets better and better the longer you let it sit with you. By the end of the film, I knew I had seen something I had never seen before, but in the hours after watching it I kept thinking about new layers to Lindy’s work that made it even more special. On one hand, Your Monster is a really obvious film, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t smart, thoughtful, and oddly inspiring.
Theatre actress Laura Franco (Melissa Barrera) has had a rough go of things. While undergoing cancer treatment and surgery, her writer-director boyfriend, Jacob (Edmund Donovan), dumps her. Not only is she heartbroken, but she’s also out a job, since the musical Jacob was about to stage has a lead role that was originally written for Laura. Without any place to go, Laura moves back into her childhood home while her unseen mother is out travelling the world. Already understandably depressed and at the end of her rope, Laura’s life gets even worse when the monster (Tommy Dewey) that once haunted her from the closet and beneath her bed during childhood decides to torment her once again. Only this time, the monster’s haunting has a purpose: he really likes the quiet of an empty house and he doesn’t want roommates. Initially, the monster tells Laura that she has two weeks to find a new place or he’ll tear her apart, but once they get to know each other, an understanding – and even a romance – begins to bloom.
Your Monster takes a little time to figure out its own formula. In the early stages, the editing is a bit choppy, the tone is still trying to gel, and the musical elements – particularly the very insistent score – aren’t landing. But once Laura and the unnamed monster start antagonizing each other like dysfunctional roommates, Lindy’s story is off to the races. With everything finally in place, the many layers of Your Monster begin to reveal themselves, making for a film with a cute idea that’s cleverly avoiding the urge to be saccharine or conventional.
The comedic, romantic, and collegial chemistry between Barrera and Dewey provides Lindy with an exceptional base to work from. Barrera (who perfects the art of the comedic “ugly cry” here) plays Laura as strong minded and self-aware, but also wounded and crippled by mounting circumstances she feels powerless to fight back against. Dewey, who can also currently be seen absolutely killing it as former SNL writer Michael O’Donoghue in Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, portrays the monster as both a reflection of Laura’s suppressed rage, but also like a great listener who cares more than he’ll ever let on. The relationship at the heart of Your Monster requires a healthy suspension of disbelief, but Barrera and Dewey ensure that the characters and their neuroses are always grounded in a sense of reality that the plot requires to work. And they’re given a perfect villainous foil in the form of Donovan’s pretentious, two-timing schmuck, a character that repeatedly doubles down on their worst impulses as time goes on.
Part of the reason the cast looks like they’re having an easy and fun time with Lindy’s material comes down to the fact that the writer-director never shies away from admitting a love for the classics. There are plenty of nods to other genre films, musicals, and romances along the way, but the most telling namecheck goes to Shakespeare, a writer the monster praises because there’s so little subtext in their writing; it’s all there on the page, plain as day. And while some things in Your Monster seem ambiguous, by the time it all wraps up with a tremendous conclusion that forces the viewer to think about and reflect upon what they just saw, it’s clear that Lindy has always been up front and honest with the viewer. It asks the viewer to both get caught up in its romantic revenge fantasy, while simultaneously allowing them to be in on the grand joke from the start. It’s a big swing, but Lindy makes it work wonders.
Your Monster works wonders as an empowering metaphor for learning to love again – and love yourself – through spending some time on the dark side of life. It’s okay to not feel okay, and you don’t have to accept that things are shitty. Those are great lessons to pass on, and Lindy parses these thoughts in thoughtful, complex ways. But Your Monster also pleases as a clearly cathartic commentary on the ways female artists are pitted against each other and gaslit repeatedly by self-appointed male “geniuses” whose faux-feminist posturing is performative and problematic. There is a lived-in sense of behind-the-scenes truthfulness that Lindy achieves effortlessly and without rubbing it in the viewer’s face. Your Monster is made for a smart audience that will pick up on its overall sentiments and layers without needing to wade through a lot of convoluted subtext.
At first, the backstage stuff in Your Monster creates a lull in the overall drive of Lindy’s material. It’s not as traditionally pleasing as the one-on-one budding relationship between Laura and her hairy new beau, but it definitely builds to something exceptional once all the threads come together. The longer I thought about this section of the film, the more I genuinely loved what it was achieving. It slows the pace considerably, but it also proves that Lindy has mastered the arts of story layering and escalation. At first I thought it didn’t quite work, but the longer Your Monster sat with me, I realized that its brilliance is as low key as it is obvious. The power of Lindy’s show-stopping climax and Barrera’s all-out performance during it helps to send things out on a high note, but the quieter moments of Your Monster hold a lot more weight in hindsight than I initially expected. There’s nothing to really compare Your Monster to, but it’s also not what you think it’s going to be based on the premise. It’s a truly exciting movie.
Your Monster opens in select Canadian theatres starting Friday, October 25, 2024.
