Your Monster Needs More Than an Outstanding Melissa Barrera

Melissa Barrera was so captivating in the film adaptation of the musical In the Heights that it’s been a buzzkill watching her career ever since, as she’s become known largely for underwhelming horror flicks. She’s clearly meant for better things than stiffly reciting wooden slasher-movie dialogue in lifeless Scream retreads. Caroline Lindy’s Your Monster at times feels like it could serve as a path for the actress back to her strengths. The film has some of the trappings of horror — and plays loosely on Barrera’s supposed status as a “scream queen” — but it’s at heart a musically inflected dark romantic comedy, a delicate enterprise that requires a beaming central performance to pull off.

Barrera plays Laura, an actress whom we first meet as she’s going in for cancer treatment. Her writer-composer boyfriend Jacob (Edmund Donovan) has created a stage musical with a lead character inspired by her, but he abandons her while she’s recovering in the hospital. Not only that, but Jacob has also recast her part in their play with a hot, famous actress (Meghann Fahy). Distraught, Laura returns to her childhood home and, amid her endless wallows in sadness, discovers that the house has been taken over by the monster (Tommy Dewey) that she used to imagine living in her closet and under her bed. Turns out he’s real, his name is Monster, and he’s a long-haired, soft-spoken beast that just wants to be left alone. (He does sort of resemble Ron Perlman’s Beast in the beloved 1980s Beauty and the Beast TV series, but there’s also more than a little Geico Caveman in there.) Out of sympathy, Monster lets Laura stay for a couple of weeks. Soon, they’re bickering over the thermostat, fighting about the remote, and making passive-aggressive comments about sharing Chinese delivery.

It’s the kind of cute idea that could power a charming short film, so it comes as little surprise that Lindy expanded this from one. As a director, she shows talent: She and cinematographer Will Stone fill the screen with warm lights and deep shadows, investing everything with a slightly unreal atmosphere that feels right for the movie’s cozy little world of New York brownstones and stage-door shenanigans. There’s a nice glow to this film perched halfway between fairy-tale and handmade indie dramedy.

Barrera also ably keeps the picture’s many tones in check, playing the big emotional moments with just enough humor to keep us from whipsawing from one extreme to another. The comedy is mostly tepid, but Barrera sells it well. Her whole performance feels like a gentle aside. She never breaks the fourth wall, but there’s an understated, tongue-in-cheek quality to everything she does — and she does it all without ever treading into the ever-perilous land of camp.

Unfortunately, Lindy’s screenplay struggles to expand the film’s concept beyond its basic, sketchy premise. Since specificity would raise too many questions, she piles on the montages, trying to get by on editing and sleight of hand. And while a romance emerges between Monster and Laura, the beast is clearly also meant to be a metaphor for the dark places her mind goes to. The film wants to have it both ways — in fact, it wants to have it more ways than that, because Monster also serves as a kind of Dostoyevskian double for our always-shrinking protagonist, an expression of her more assertive self. He’s a symbol, and he’s not the only one. Laura’s best friend, Mazie (Kayla Foster), talks a good game about always being there for her (“I’m your ride or die, bitch!”) but seems to keep abandoning Laura during times of need. The heartless, stuck-up Jacob, true to narrative form, always conveniently does the exact wrong thing — so much so that we may start to wonder if the whole thing is just playing out in Laura’s head.

Movies need not be literal-minded, or even unpredictable, but they do need to be something. If Your Monster were funnier, or more twisted, its tangential relationship to anything resembling real human behavior might have worked; we give a lot of leeway to silly stories if they genuinely make us laugh, or feel suspense, or even revulsion. Your Monster has some chucklesome moments, none of it enough to paper over the film’s many contrivances. And some late-breaking gruesome bits can’t retroactively redeem the lazy writing. But the movie does have Barrera, and maybe that’s enough.