Right from its opening minutes, Your Monster is walking a tightrope. It somehow manages to keep a light touch through a sequence where aspiring Broadway star Laura (Melissa Barrera) is diagnosed with cancer before her partner Jacob’s (Edmund Donovan) new musical can come to the stage with a role specifically written for her. Jacob, though, doesn’t have the spine or stamina for being a caretaker, and dumps Laura while she’s in the hospital, leaving the poor woman calling after him while attached to her chemo bag.
To writer-director Caroline Lindy’s credit, she pulls it off in the first act, especially with the sequence that follows, with Barrera committing to the comedy in all the drama as Laura eats her feelings. Barrera is Your Monster’s trump card, with Lindy pulling a lively performance out of her while still keeping Laura feeling like a real girl trying to carefully mend a broken heart.
Soon after, though, Lindy starts trying to juggle while on that tightrope. Enter the Monster (Tommy Dewey), a creature that looks and acts like the sardonic millennial kid of the big-haired Vincent from the Beauty and the Beast TV series. Specifically, the Monster is Laura’s childhood closet monster, and now he’s making an almighty mess of her apartment. He’s re-entered the picture at just the right time—that is, when Laura has some primal rage that she needs to get off her chest. And in the process of what ensues between them, he gets in touch with his softer side.
That’s all pretty typical stuff for a Beauty and the Beast riff, but that eventually has to coexist with the story of Laura landing a role in Jacob’s play and having to see him fawn over the taller, blonder actress, Jackie Dennen (Meghann Fahy), cast in the role written for Laura. That material plays out a bit less predictably than one might expect, and the comedy lands well with the eclectic group of Broadway veterans in the production. That stretch of the film could’ve gone to some appropriately messy places much more often. As it is, the peak of the theater drama comes in a fiery scene during which Laura unleashes her frustrations during rehearsals.
Or, rather, that should be the peak of the drama, but Your Monster has one more trick up its sleeve before the credits roll: a climax to everything emotionally beautiful and chaotic and furious about Laura’s relationship with the Monster that would be gloriously perfect…in another film. This is the moment where Lindy fouls her high-wire act, introducing a horror element that, while magnificently executed, turns the dial on Your Monster’s tone up past 11—well past the comfortable, lighthearted four that it’s at up to this point.
Barrera’s Laura may be full of rage, but the kind of monster she is doesn’t line up with where her rage leads her. And while she doesn’t necessarily need a happily ever after, she and her Monster are too endearing to have their story go down the path Your Monster leads them.
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