Your Monster Review

Laura (Melissa Barrera) is having a tough time of it, to put it mildly. She’s just had surgery for cancer. In the hospital, her boyfriend of five years, Jacob (Edmund Donovan), broke up with her. He is an up-and-coming musical theatre director who had been writing a show with her in mind for the lead. Now, he won’t even invite her to audition. It seems as if she can’t catch a break.

Recuperating at her mother’s empty apartment, where she used to live when she was young, one night she runs into Monster (Tommy Dewey). At first, she’s scared – he is after all, a monster! Soon though, she starts to enjoy his company, and this most bizarre of relationships turns out to have an effect on her life that no-one could have anticipated.

Your Monster, the debut feature from writer-director Caroline Lindy, is a real mish-mash of genres. First of all, obviously, it’s a monster movie. It’s a classical romance. It’s a revenge tale. It’s a backstage musical. It’s a story of female empowerment. And it’s something darker and stranger than any of those things; something that defies classification. With so many divergent elements at play, it should have been a tough ask for the relatively untested Lindy to keep all those plates spinning without them flying off in every direction.

She manages, though – and with aplomb. Lindy directs her debut with an infectious confidence, and it rapidly becomes exciting to see in which direction she’s going to take the action next. In an age of big, bland movies that are made by committee, it’s thrilling to see something as offbeat and personal as Your Monster succeed as well as it does. It has crowd-pleasing beats – there’s a luxuriously romantic dance scene, a triumphant musical number, a villain so noxious you might find yourself quietly booing every time he’s on screen – but a whole host of off-kilter moments too, including a shocking ending that’s really quite brave in its ambiguity. And the identity of Monster, while not exactly surprising, gives the film even more of an exceptional edge.

Lindy deserves most of the credit, of course, but a lot of it is also due to lead Melissa Barrera. She has to inhabit the entire range of the emotional spectrum – from despair, to love, to incandescent fury, to glee – and she does it with commanding ease. So much of Your Monster (more than you first realise…) revolves around her character’s personal growth, and she makes that journey an engrossing one. There’s an instant, lovely chemistry between her and Monster Tommy Dewey too, which is no mean feat for either of them with that mound of prosthetics in the way! Barrera has been bubbling under for a few years now with her roles in the Scream franchise, In The Heights, and the little-seen Carmen; this should be the movie that solidifies her as a fully-fledged star.

Weird, warm, and downright wonderful, Your Monster is a delightful debut from a director to watch.

★★★★★

Your Monster is in UK and Ireland cinemas 29 November from Vertigo Releasing