Lindy seeks love and romance with ‘Your Monster’

Cinema | October 28th, 2024

By Greg Carlson

Caroline Lindy expands her short film “Your Monster” to feature length with mixed results. The movie premiered in the Midnight section of the Sundance Film Festival in January, but makes for a thematically appropriate Halloween season experience for romantics and theater kids seeking a not-too-scary fantasy. Despite the somewhat exaggerated and limiting appellation tagging her as a new “scream queen,” star Melissa Barrera comfortably steps into the role originally played by Kimiko Glenn. As Monster, Tommy Dewey reprises his beastly beau. The actor can also be seen portraying Michael O’Donoghue in Jason Reitman’s “Saturday Night,” currently in theaters.

Lindy’s script swings for more comedy than horror in the tale of Barrera’s Laura, a young cancer survivor whose long relationship with aspiring director/composer Jacob (Edmund Donovan) comes to a close just as the musical she helped him conceive makes its way to the stage. Without an offer to play the role originally written for her, Laura accepts a spot in the chorus. Meanwhile, Laura gets reacquainted with the creature who inhabited her closet and slept under her bed when she moves back to her childhood home. Laura and Monster both want to claim the living space, but soon enough they start to behave like an adorable couple, arguing over the thermostat and sharing Chinese takeout.

Monster’s leonine profile and flowing locks resemble forerunners Jean Marais and Ron Perlman enough to confirm Lindy’s “Beauty and the Beast” inspiration, but the filmmaker elects not to answer the question that wonders whether Monster is only a metaphoric representation of Laura’s uninhibited and unfiltered id or a genuine, flesh and blood brute. It is entirely possible, of course, to read Laura’s budding romance with her hairy roommate as an ode to self-love (if not masturbation), and given Lindy’s tongue-in-cheek tone and the interweaving of the film’s two primary storylines during the violent premiere-night finale of Jacob’s show, open-minded viewers will get into Lindy’s groove.

The counter-argument is that “Your Monster” sticks too close to the one-thing-at-a-time formula, a liability that allows viewers to get ahead of the plot points. A case can be made that the movie could readily sustain more business via subplots with key supporting characters. Fans of Graham Mason’s brilliant 2020 comedy “Inspector Ike” will perk up every single time that Ikechukwu Ufomadu appears as stage manager Don. I began mentally begging Lindy to include more scenes with the actor and for “Your Monster” to take the kind of bold creative risks and sharp left turns maximized in “Ike.” For a movie with a premise in which someone falls in love with their freakish and frightful closet occupier, Lindy could use a lot more weirdness.

Despite its shortcomings, “Your Monster” will find admirers among the legion of misfit drama kids for whom the story is presented as a love song. Near the beginning of the movie, some inconsiderate patrons in the screening I attended exclaimed, “If this is a musical, we are out of here,” but anyone who has ever been involved with a theatrical production can easily see Lindy’s affinity for and understanding of that world. And Barerra, dressed throughout by costume designer Matthew Simonelli in cozy sweaters, jumpers, and jammies, elevates the material with a tone that balances her characterization right on the line between too much and not enough.

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