A beast of conflicting genres, Your Monster gets trampled in the telling

The trick to genre-mixing within a movie is making sure all the disparate parts are equally great. Shaun Of The Dead, American Werewolf In London, and even Splash get it right when they make major tonal shifts, or blend the seemingly unblendable. Writer-director Caroline Lindy’s Your Monster aspires to that equilibrium, weaving together a Beauty And The Beast-themed rom-com with an original musical and a horror film about suppressed rage. While her excellent leads, Melissa Barrera and Tommy Dewey, land the witty rom-com for the first two-thirds of the film, the horror and musical elements abruptly subsume the last act in the service of a twist that doesn’t pass muster.

Your Monster originated in 2020 as a semi-autobiographical short inspired by similar events that happened to Lindy in her 20s. This feature-length expansion ports over Dewey to reprise his role as the Monster, while Barrera continues her streak of winning roles, this time as Laura Franco, an aspiring actress in New York. Laura’s in the latter stages of battling cancer when she gets dumped by her boyfriend, Jacob (Edmund Donovan). Adding insult to injury, before she got sick, they had been developing an original musical together where he promised her the lead…until he dumped her from her dream role too.

Sick, jobless, and homeless, Laura is discharged from the hospital into the hands of her comically self-obsessed best friend Mazie (Kayla Foster), who then drops Laura off at her childhood home, now empty because her mother is traveling in Europe. Adrift, Laura drowns herself in tears, pastries, and inappropriate delivery man hugging as she copes with her loneliness and misery. That is, until an ominous thumping in the attic eventually reveals Monster. He’s a hairy man-beast who has lived in her closet since she was a child, appearing to defend her when she wasn’t being treated well by friends or family. 

Laura is requisitely freaked out at his existence, but is even more taken aback by his surly attitude and vehement displeasure at her staying in his domain, where he likes to read and listen to classic vinyl in peace. With nowhere to go, Laura’s sobs earn a reprieve from the Monster and gets two weeks to find somewhere else to live which coincides with her plan to audition for Jacob’s play and win back her role.

Lindy has a deft hand at reproducing the look and feel of classic ‘90s rom-coms, utilizing a plethora of well-edited montages and choosing plenty of eclectic needledrops while warmly framing her leads. Unlike the year’s other uneven monster/human rom-com, Lisa Frankenstein, Your Monster’s crackles with plenty of laughs and a genuine connection. Laura and Monster’s odd couple schtick is remarkably charming because of the palpable chemistry between Barrera and Dewey, who spar with simmering heat and vulnerability. Watching them learn to cohabitate, then eventually like one another within the walls of their shared brownstone is juxtaposed well against Laura’s uphill battle at the musical, where she’s cast as the understudy for the part meant for her.

This unconventional romance also works because of the success of the prosthetics and makeup team in giving Dewey a handsome Beast look that allows for the nuance in his facial performance to come through. It makes all the difference in believing that these two species-crossed lonely hearts have enough common ground to have you root for Laura to stop chasing Jacob and look at the fuzzy prince charming living under the same roof. 

However, as soon as things get steamy, the script sidelines the beast to instead focus on the increasing melodrama happening to Laura during rehearsals at the theater. Lindy’s script crams in rekindled feelings, cast betrayals, and trite twists which devolve into cliched scenarios that aren’t half as engrossing as when Lindy was applying all of her rom-com magic to scenes between Barrera and Dewey. Even more disconcerting is Lindy’s decision to portray Jacob’s musical to a jarringly excessive degree. There’s no question that Barrera is a talented musical theater performer, and that Lindy goes all-in when it comes to showcasing her prowess in conveying passion through song. But the decision to serve up a compressed presentation of the entire first act of the musical is distractingly indulgent.

With less overwrought elements taking up valuable story space, Your Monster could have genuinely surprised and had something of consequence to say about the perils of suppressing your emotions. Instead, its ending pivot is a huge disappointment, one that leaves you imagining a version of Your Monster where the rom-com nirvana of Laura and Monster’s connection was still central, made sense, and played out to a more worthy conclusion.

Director: Caroline Lindy
Writer: Caroline Lindy
Starring: Melissa Barrera, Tommy Dewey, Edmund Donovan, Kayla Foster, Meghann Fahy
Release Date: October 25, 2024