‘Your Monster’: Sundance Review

Dir/scr: Caroline Lindy. US. 2024. 101mins

What if the monster living under you childhood bed ended up becoming your soulmate? That clever premise powers writer-director Caroline Lindy’s feature debut, a quirky romantic comedy highlighted by the luminous rapport between Melissa Barrera and Tommy Dewey playing a modern-day beauty and beast. But as delightful as the duo is,Your Monster stumbles to capitalise on its story of a struggling actress who finds courage (and an unlikely love) in the scary creature who has been by her side since childhood. 

Lacks the teeth to be an incisive takedown of romantic comedies

Your Monster premieres in Sundance’s Midnight section, peppering its love story with a dash of horror and a smattering of musical asides (not to mention jokes about the theatre world). Because of her association with the recent Scream sequels and In The Heights, Barrera should be a draw for this indie comedy, whose target audience will be viewers who like their romcoms a bit caustic and a little bloody. 

Barrera plays Laura, a New York actress-singer who is madly in love with her boyfriend Jacob (Edmund Donovan), a rising composer-director about to mount his first musical which she helped to develop. But after she is diagnosed with cancer, Jacob dumps her, leaving Laura to move back into her family’s empty home in order to take care of herself. Laura soon realises she is not alone, though: Monster (Dewey), the frightening beast who has periodically come into her life – even though Laura has blocked out the memories – emerges from the closet, explaining that this is his home now and she needs to leave.

Lindy, who previously made a 2020 short based around the same concept (also with Dewey playing Monster), has crafted a classic opposites-attract rom-com in which these two very different individuals fall in love. That premise could not be more familiar, but the leads have such terrific chemistry that such quibbles hardly matter. Despite his fearsome appearance, Monster is a softie, getting weepy at Fred Astaire films and feeling sorry for Laura’s situation — especially after she discovers that Jacob is planning to go ahead with his musical, casting someone else in the lead role he had once promised her.

But just as romance starts to blossom between Laura and Monster, the film shifts direction, with Laura talking her way into being a background performer in Jacob’s musical which appears to be a comically insufferable self-aggrandising salute to the courage and resilience of women. Donovan is fairly one-note in the role of the pompous ex who gives Laura’s plum part away to a shallow but more famous actress (Meghann Fahy), but even so, Your Monster has some fun ribbing the pretensions and preciousness of theatre life.

Unfortunately, once the picture becomes more of a ’putting on a show’ narrative — with Laura and Jacob slowly reconnecting as they prepare for the musical’s premiere — Lindy’s script loses momentum thanks to predictable twists and a few questionable decisions made by Laura, who starts behaving out of character in order to further the plot.

David LeRoy Anderson does superb makeup work on Dewey, cheekily recalling the mythic Beast from both the Jean Cocteau film and the more recent Disney adaptations. Barrera’s background in both horror and musicals puts her on strong footing with Your Monster’s mix of genres, although Laura is sometimes a cliched hapless sad sack. And while airtight logic is hardly a prerequisite for a whimsical, sarcastic fantasy picture like Your Monster, Lindy does not do a great job establishing exactly how Monster has come into Laura’s life in the past. (The film’s slightly shocking ending hints at a possible interpretation of events that is not particularly satisfying or intriguing.) 

That said, whenever Laura is with Monster, Lindy’s debut can be a low-key charmer. The film lacks the teeth to be an incisive takedown of romantic comedies — in truth, it works best at its sweetest. Dewey communicates a lifetime of longing in those soulful eyes that pop through Monster’s makeup, and Barrera brings an endearing amount of dorky energy. But whenever these characters leave the house, the problems start — both for their relationship and the film itself.