“Based on a True(ish) story.”
Caroline Lindy’s Your Monster is a sweet trilled high note curdling into a scream of feminine rage. As anyone who has read or seen a fairytale know, appearances can be deceptive. Your Monster plays with appearances and deception from its quirky premise: young woman falls in love with her childhood ‘monster in the closet’ is what we think we are getting, and we are, but we are getting a lot more. Lindy’s deliberate slightness is a sleight of hand as she, and star Melissa Barrera, deliver a fantasy ro(monster) comedy about getting beastly to get by.
Laura Franco is an aspiring Broadway performer living with her composer/playwright boyfriend Jacob Sullivan (Edmund Donovan) in what seems like a functional and supportive partnership. Or rather she was. As the film opens Laura is being wheeled out of the hospital with a thousand-mile stare as Dick Van Dyke’s version of ‘Put on a Happy Face’ from Bye Bye Birdie plays. She’s at the end of her cancer treatment and the previous months appear in flashback. Diagnosis. Shock. Tests. Treatment. In the tenth month Jacob gets up from the chair next to her hospital bed and proclaims she needs a full-time carer and that isn’t going to be him. He needs time for himself. Laura begs him to stay limping down the hallway still attached to her IV fluids. Her friend, Maize (Kayla Foster) has come to take her home. But Laura isn’t going back to the apartment she shared with Jacob. She’s going ‘home’ to her absent mother’s brownstone where she grew up.
Maize, her ‘ride or die’ best friend deposits her, tells her not to cry, and exits. For the next few weeks crying is all Laura does becoming well acquainted with the Amazon Delivery guy bringing her tissues. When she’s not crying, she’s eating cake. Remembering the songs she wrote with Jacob for his musical The House of Good Women and getting fly by visits from Maize who informs her Jacob is casting the show. Despite promising her the lead role he hasn’t communicated with her. Laura’s dreams are as crumpled as the soggy tissues pilling around her.
On a dark and stormy night (when else?) Laura finds Monster (Tommy Dewey) in her closet. He casually says, “‘Sup”, she passes out in shock. Turns out Monster has been around since she was a kid, and she doesn’t quite recall him which he finds a bit insulting. There is some quick reminiscing and Monster lays down the ultimatum. It’s his house now and Laura is going to have to leave because she’s cramping his ‘no crying people’ getting in the way of his cranky juju vibe. She starts crying again and Monster relents giving her two weeks to get out.
Laura and Monster don’t exactly get along. They argue about food, the thermostat, the remote, the music she plays on the piano. Turns out Monster isn’t quite as scary as he seems – turns out he likes musicals and softens towards Laura. He even offers to eat Jacob for her and encourages her to audition for the part that was written for her.
The audition doesn’t go particularly well. Jacob almost pretends he doesn’t know her. She blows the singing part. Established star Jackie Dennon (Meghann Faye) is implicitly given the role. Back at home Monster cheers her up as best he can. They read Shakespeare together. Turns out he’s pretty good with the Bard and quite the romantic. Jacob calls and Monster tells Laura she should tell him his play is terrible and riddled with cliches. Instead, she takes the understudy role beneath Jackie which also makes her part of the ensemble. She swallows her discomfort and anger until Monster encourages her to let out some of her negative emotions by smashing plates. Two weeks have passed, and he tells her to stay, “You know if you want to.”
Table reads begin for the show. Maize is part of the cast. Jacob begins with a quote from Malala Yousafzai and how the show is honouring women. He might as well have ‘performative male feminist’ tattooed across his pretentious face. But he’s making tiny concessions with Laura and somehow that appears almost enough. But as Monster points out, is it really? When Laura decides to go to the cast Halloween party (inviting Monster who declines to hang out with theatre geeks) the reality of how the smallest concessions from Jacob have kept her hanging on kicks in. Having Jacob see and approve of her in her unthreatening and diminutive form (she dresses like a 1970s kid on Sesame Street) might have been in her mind him embracing her oddity and earnestness – but as she walks into the party as the Bride of Frankenstein, Lindy isn’t skimping on symbolism. Especially as Jacob is dressed as a Knight.
Even as Monster arrives at the party unexpectedly to sweep her off her feet Laura still can’t quite keep her eyes off Jacob because of how confused and tethered she remains until Monster forces a radical break in both Jacob’s arm and in Laura’s subservient thinking. She finally embraces that what Jacob did was not okay. It was not okay to dump her when she was sick. It was not okay to write ‘Laurie Francis’ for her and take it away from her. It’s not okay, but Monster is definitely okay. Monster is there for her, and how. Her lover, her support, her ‘take the love you deserve’ cheerleader. All the things she needed but never claimed.
Laura begins getting angry, really angry. Angry with Jacob, angry with Mazie and her shitty do-nothing version of friendship. She’s angry with herself too, angry that she spent five years with a man who leaned on her for everything, making promises she believed and somehow still does. But how can she focus her newly discovered roar, and is it going to help her or harm her?
Caroline Lindy works her horror, romance, musical comedy with a heady blend of melodrama, droll wit, and magic. Hers is an exaggerated world, not simply because of a cool, smart, talented, and charismatic Monster hiding in the darkness in Laura’s life, but because the theatre itself is a two-dimensional stage where men have long called “It’s showtime!”
Your Monster knows it is skating on the surface of more profound messages, but it embraces the fable and fairytale logic to enhance how women are taught that being the good girl will be rewarded despite knowing it won’t be. Melissa Barrera and Tommy Dewey are charming leads with Barrera once again proving she has an irresistible screen presence.
Caroline Lindy weaves a nimble flight of fancy in a coming-of-rage narrative. Your Monster is the perfect bed in the story of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’. It’s not too hard, it’s not too soft, it’s just right.
Director: Caroline Lindy
Cast: Melissa Barrera, Tommy Dewey, Edmund Donovan
Writer: Caroline Lindy
Producers: Kira Carstensen, Melanie Donkers, Kayla Foster, Caroline Lindy, Shannon Reilly
Music: Tim Williams
Cinematography: Will Stone
Editors: Daysha Broadway, Jon Higgins