Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Caroline Lindy
Starring: Melissa Barrera, Tommy Dewey, Meghann Fahy, Edmund Donovan, Kayla Foster
On paper the premise of Your Monster reads like the basis for
the sort of sitcom that wouldn't have made it past six episodes in the '90s:
a struggling Broadway performer befriends and eventually romances the
monster she finds living in her closet. But writer/director
Caroline Lindy's expansion of her 2019 short doesn't play its setup
entirely for laughs. It's arguably closer to what most of us expected from
Joker: Folie á Deux
once we heard the shock news of that sequel's musical elements. The monster
here functions in similar fashion to Joker's Harley Quinn, giving our sad
sack protagonist a new lease of life by bringing out her aggressive side.
Lindy's film is also something of a gender-reversed Fight Club, with the monster, whom we surmise is a figment of the anti-heroine's
troubled mind, a stand-in for Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden, the confident figure
she wishes she could be.
As played by Melissa Barrera, Laura Franco is dogged by health
issues of both the physical and mental varieties. The movie opens with her
leaving hospital after a year of battling cancer, during which she was
coldly dumped by her Broadway director boyfriend Jacob (Edmund Donovan). While together, Laura and Jacob had collaborated on penning a musical,
with Jacob promising Laura the lead role. On release from hospital, Laura
finds that not only has Jacob jettisoned her from his romantic life, but
also from his play, giving the role to popular star Jackie Dennon (Meghann Fahy).
Moving into her vacant childhood home, Melissa spends her days moping
around, gorging herself on cakes, ordering Amazon products she doesn't need
and crying at Fred Astaire musicals. Hearing strange noises from her
childhood bedroom, she's shocked to discover a monster (Tommy Dewey)
living in her closet, the very same one that she presumed was imaginary when
she was a kid. The monster gives her two weeks to leave the house, and in
classic sitcom style the pair have an initially abrasive relationship,
largely represented through montages of Laura and the monster fighting over
the thermostat and TV remote. But the monster eventually reveals a sensitive
side and the two become friends. Encouraged by the monster's philosophy of
refusing to conceal anger, Laura decides to stand up for herself. She even
auditions for a role in Jacob's play, and is awarded the position of
understudy to Jackie. But the influence of the monster begins to send Laura
down a dark path.
Your Monster finds itself caught between two very different
movies. One is a light and breezy sitcom-esque rom-com, the other a much
darker exploration of a troubled young woman's fractured psyche. Barrera's
adorable performance makes it very easy to empathise with Laura, perhaps too
easy. If the genders were reversed I'm not convinced that we would view
Laura as anything other than yet another self-pitying young male sociopath
(we're never given any real evidence that Laura deserves the lead role in
Jacob's play). Laura's history of cancer is a cheaply manipulative way of
getting the audience onside (albeit inspired by the director's own medical
history). Remove it and the movie would arguably become more interesting,
certainly more nuanced, than the simple female empowerment/revenge fantasy
Your Monster is content to settle for. In the closing scenes
the film dares to take a darker turn, but by that point it jars with the
largely treacly film with which we've been relatively engaged. I couldn't
help but compare Your Monster with Jill Gevargizian's
The Stylist, which is similarly a female rage fantasy but one that makes it clear that
violent fantasies make for grim reality when acted upon (and crucially it
puts innocents in its protagonist's firing line, something even this year's
light-hearted
Lisa Frankenstein, which shares a similar premise to Lindy's film, was willing to do).
You probably won't think about Your Monster's narrative flaws until the end credits begin rolling, as its light
approach makes it an easy, undemanding watch. Even if the script never makes
Laura as complex and interesting as she really should be, Barrera covers
some of the flaws in the writing with the best performance of her career to
date. The actress has vacillated between scream queen (Scream;
Abigail) and musical star (In the Heights;
Carmen), and Your Monster gives her the opportunity to indulge both
of her established personae. Her comic timing and facial expressions often
make up for the lack of sufficiently witty dialogue, and she's equally
convincing as the initial put-upon victim and the assertive figure she grows
into, along with displaying some impressive vocal chops when she's required
to belt out a tune.
Barrera shares a charming chemistry with Dewey as her unconventional lover,
and if the movie were a more conventional rom-com we would have no problem
rooting for this unlikely couple. But Your Monster complicates
things with reminders that Monster is just that, a monster. Again, this is
an aspect the film never quite interrogates fully, the idea that Monster
presents himself as a "nice guy" who says all the right things Laura needs
to hear, but could tear her apart if he turns on her.
Your Monster brushes up against some uncomfortable truths
regarding relationships, but it ultimately sweeps them aside for a broadly
played "slay queen" fantasy.
Your Monster is in UK/ROI cinemas
and on VOD from November 29th.
