Your Monster

by Mike McGranaghan

Melissa Barrera is best known for horror movies like the recent Scream entries and Abigail. She can do a whole lot more than act scared, as her underseen features In the Heights and Carmen demonstrate. (Seriously, see both of them.) Your Monster has the potential to be her true breakout role. As a modern-day take on Beauty and the Beast, it’s horror-adjacent, but Barrera also gets to sing, dance, do comedy, and be a romantic lead.

She plays Laura Franco, an aspiring Broadway actress whose writer/director boyfriend Jacob (Edmund Donovan) gives the leading role he penned for her to another actress after they break up, leaving her demoted to a member of the chorus. Laura’s rage brings the return of the Monster (Saturday Night’s Tommy Dewey), a creature who lives in her closet and was a fixture of her childhood. Although they don’t get along at first, affection develops, followed by romance. Monster recognizes that Jacob isn’t entirely out of Laura’s head, though, and he encourages her to stand up to him – an act much easier said than done.

The movie takes an unexpected, yet pleasing approach to Monster. Rather than a fearsome beast, he’s presented as comically sarcastic. Humor arises from the way his brash personality alternately charms and inspires the timid Laura. Dewey delivers the screenplay’s one-liners with pinpoint accuracy, creating one of the year’s most amusing characters in the process. He also builds sweet, sincere chemistry with his co-star.

Written and directed by Caroline Lindy, Your Monster is a romantic fantasy centered around anger. The question isn’t so much whether Laura and Monster will find true love, it’s whether she’ll be able to exorcise her frustrations with Jacob and claim what’s rightfully hers. The central relationship is, in many respects, a metaphor for our need to embrace the darker parts of our personalities when necessary. They exist to help us, a realization Laura desperately needs to come to.

In the center of it all is Melissa Barrera, who is absolutely wonderful in the role. She makes us believe that Laura falls in love with Monster. She matches Dewey in the comedy department. She nails a musical number in the finale. Every side of her talent gets a chance to shine here. The character could have come off as annoyingly self-pitying; Barrera gives her enough heart to prevent that.

Early scenes in Your Monster are a little sketchy. Laura and Monster fight, then abruptly fall for each other. It occurs a bit too quickly. Once you get over the thinness of their courtship, the movie takes off, delivering big laughs, a touching love story, and a cathartic portrait of sweet revenge. All in all, this is a really fun film.

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