YOUR MONSTER is a 2024 romantic comedy with a fantastical genre concept. Laura (Melissa Barrera, ABIGAIL) is a theater actor who gets dumped by her longtime boyfriend Jacob (Edmund Donovan, CIVIL WAR) while she’s in the hospital getting cancer treatments. She lived with him, so when she gets discharged she goes to stay at her wealthy but absent mother’s house to try to put herself back together. But she doesn’t really get around to that. She mostly eats pies that her mom sends and cries so much that she starts getting regular Kleenex shipments from Amazon.

Then one day she’s startled by a monster (Tommy Dewey, STEP UP REVOLUTION) in the closet. He’s not that fancy of a monster, just kinda like Ron Perlman’s Beast on Beauty and the Beast – gnarly brow, lion-like nose, long hair and beard, hairy hands. He is a monster, but he wears t-shirts and just talks like a dude. When she wakes up from fainting he’s kinda offended she doesn’t remember him. He reminds her she saw him under her bed when she was a kid. And he chased off some dork who tried to kiss her and tried to shame her for not wanting to. I think she remembers.

Anyway, he says the house is his now and she needs to get the fuck out. She cries for a while, so he gives her two weeks.

Yeah, it’s some BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and some MONSTERS, INC. (or LITTLE MONSTERS?) and a dash of horror. And also it’s a behind-the-scenes-theater story like STAYING ALIVE or CENTERSTAGE or something. Her ex wrote a musical called House of Good Women, she helped him develop it, wrote some of the lyrics, starred in the workshop version, in the role he said he wrote for her, that’s even named after her. Now it’s actually happening and she kinda assumes she still gets to do it until she finds out from fellow actor friend Mazie (Kayla Foster, THE WILD) that auditions are happening.

Mazie is a funny character, she has a real Kathryn Hahn sort of lovable bitch thing going. She brings Laura home from the hospital, slathers her in affirmations of love and invocations of girl power, tells her she’s a champion and that they’re gonna get through this together, then immediately leaves her alone while clearly convinced she’s the most supportive friend of all time.

Monster, it turns out, is a way better friend. He did threaten to tear her throat out when they first reunited, I’m not necessarily forgiving that, but maybe it’s cultural. There’s a bit of that traditional Beauty & the Beast discomfort about what his monster temper represents, I admit. But it makes a pretty big difference that he’s letting her stay out of pity rather than forcing her to stay. They bond by accident when they watch her favorite movie ROYAL WEDDING on tv and she notices, with amusement, that he’s moved to tears at the end just like she is. Later he claims to be an actor and insists on doing a Shakespeare soliloquy for her. She teases him and gives him notes but his performance clearly moves her. They have a moment.

This guy looks gross, not because he’s a monster but because he’s an ugly monster, like a GEICO caveman or a character from a bad episode of Angel. But they have a chemistry that works for me simply because they joke around with each other and make each other laugh and it seems genuine. And he’s sometimes able to talk her down from trashing herself without laying it on too thick or seeming full of shit. So she gets the confidence to go through with her cockamamie plan of showing up and trying to get an audition for the musical. It’s awkward and she bombs, but Jacob (out of guilt?) offers to let her have a bit part and be the understudy for the very innocent and enthusiastic celebrity they gave the lead to, Jackie Dennon (Meghann Fahy, DROP).

The character of Jacob alternates between being entertainingly detestable and being a bit of a cartoon villain, but it mostly works. When he opens the first table reading with a Malala quote it’s maybe a little too much but it made me laugh. Laura seems to have more of an unhealthy attachment to her past with him than a real love, so I accept her attraction to such a doofus as one of her struggles instead of holding it against her. Meanwhile, she’s getting along so well with Monster.

One of the most straight forward uses of a romance trope is the tried and true classic where she comes down the stairs all dressed up for a party, he’s taken aback by how beautiful she looks and blurts out, “You look—“ The only twist is that he’s a monster and she’s dressed up as the Bride of Frankenstein for a Halloween party, but it comes across as completely sincere, and it works on a sincere level. This is what I was wanting from HEART EYES. That movie should be more my speed because of the slasher stuff, but any time they leaned into the romance they had to make everybody act really broad and ridiculous so you know they don’t really mean it. YOUR MONSTER supports my theory that really meaning it goes a long way.

YOUR MONSTER is the feature debut of writer/director Caroline Lindy. She’s done a bunch of shorts, though, including a sixteen minute version of this in 2020. Dewey played the monster in the short, with the same look. Laura was played by prolific animation voice artist Kimiko Glenn.

I think the feature version is a solid first movie, but more than that it’s a good calling card for Barrera. I thought she was pretty good in SCREAM (2022) and SCREAM VI, the final two movies of the SCREAM series, before they wisely decided to call it quits forever and never even think about making another one. And I liked her in ABIGAIL. But YOUR MONSTER is the best I’ve ever seen her. Mainly it’s a romcom lead, which requires a specific type of charisma that includes being relatable in her failures and depression as well as being cute in like ten different amazing sweaters. And since this is a fairly hip indie movie about artists in the city, not some Hallmark small town idealism, she has to do that without seeming too square.

Also you have to believe it when she enjoys monster sex with hissing. So there’s a little bit of an edge to her – I will not call this a horror movie, but it dips its toes into horror in ways that are a little bit of an odd fit with the rest of the movie but that therefore kinda give it some personality. Monster is mostly a dude, but a little bit of a metaphor for her suppressed rage and how it can sometimes be empowering to stand up for herself and confront the way she’s been wronged. Also sometimes that can be a dangerous choice, but the movie never feels like it’s trying to moralize about it.

An additional challenge for Barrera is that she has to do a bunch of singing. I guess I forgot she was in the movie of IN THE HEIGHTS, and another musical movie called CARMEN, so this was known that she could do this. But she has to sing the same song (written by Patrick and Daniel Lazour) in a bunch of different ways: when they’re writing the song together, when she’s practicing it, when she’s badly auditioning with it, finally when she’s nailing it on stage. To my ears it’s a fairly legit modern musical type of song, it didn’t take me out of the movie. (You don’t have to tell me if it sucks by real musical standards or not. I would never know the difference. I guess you can tell me though. I should probly know.)

Oh, and Dewey is great too. It can’t be easy to be so likable when you look like that and also you have to sometimes fly into a rage and break things so you don’t seem too safe. He really pulls it off.