Written and Directed by Caroline Lindy | 103 min | ▲▲▲△△ | VOD
New Yorker and musical theatre actor Laura (Melissa Barrera) has just had cancer surgery. The timing’s bad: she and her boyfriend, Jacob (Edmund Donovan) have been working on an original musical theatre project. Even worse, Jacob dumps Laura while she’s in her hospital bed and continues to work on the project without her.
Laura takes refuge in her childhood home — her mother’s absent — while her outrageous friend, Mazie (Kayla Foster), checks in on her from time to time. It turns out, while Laura is going through boxes of tissue, wallowing in her heartbreak, she’s annoying the full time resident of this brownstone, Monster (Tommy Dewey). He’s a hairy dude whose make-up really takes after the Ron Perlman version of the Beast from Beauty And The Beast, and he’s a real asshole. He wants Laura out, but is willing to put up with her, and get into her business, for two weeks.
But, hold up a second. What’s the deal with her mother? Why is Jacob such a jerk, and was he always this way? And where did Monster come from? Was he in the house the whole time she was growing up? You don’t get the impression filmmaker Caroline Lindy thought of a backstory for any of her characters. Since this is loosely based on a true story maybe she figured she didn’t need to provide that kind of detail, but it makes this whole production feel pretty half-baked.
The picture takes a bit of a turn when Laura auditions for the musical she developed with Jacob and doesn’t get the lead, a part that was written with her in mind — instead it goes to a Broadway star, Jackie (Meghann Fahy, terrific in White Lotus Season Two).
For some inexplicable reason Jacob offers Laura the understudy for the lead, which means she’s part of the production, living with her humiliation and having to spend time with her awful ex. This doesn’t make any sense, but at the same time that’s also when the picture starts to work — as a behind-the-scenes musical theatre dramedy, Your Monster has traction.
However, as a tale of an insecure cancer survivor and her hairy roomie who we’re supposed to stan — it lacks the requisite magic. He needs rules and an origin story. Can he leave the house anytime he wants to, can he be her romantic partner? Or is he just a figment of her imagination, some manifestation of her inner rage? This could’ve been the cutest New York interspecies couple since Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah in Splash, but it can’t quite get there.
The movie also tries to sell the conceit that Melissa Barrera is hiding her charm under her insecurities while everyone’s gaga over Jackie, but it’s clear in every moment of this picture that nobody would be looking at anyone else in any room Barrera walks into, and as her rendition Donny Hathaway’s ” A Song For You” proves, she’s got terrific pipes, too. She’s why you’ll stick this out. In the final assessment Your Monster stumbles as much as it sings — she’s the calm, steady centre of a picture about repressed anger.
