‘Your Monster’ Review: A Miscast Melissa Barrera Bonds With the Beast Under Her Bed
variety.comPeter Debruge Chief Film Critic If Ann Landers had it right, and hanging on to resentment amounts to letting someone you despise live rent-free in your head, then “Your Monster” is what happens when you kick open the door and let those feelings run amok.
Drawing from personal experience, writer-director Caroline Lindy delivers a clumsy metaphor of a movie, in which a promising young actor named Laura Franco (“In the Heights” star Melissa Barrera) has her Broadway dreams derailed by a cancer diagnosis, only to discover a ferocious inner strength, courtesy of the beastly creature she finds hanging around her childhood home.
In what amounts to a heavy-handed empowerment tale, the monster in question (Tommy Dewey, made up to suggest a cross between a goat-bearded New York hipster and the leonine lothario Ron Perlman played in CBS’ late-’80s series “Beauty and the Beast”) is at first a surly roommate, later a potential love interest and ultimately a manifestation of Laura’s long-suppressed sense of rage.
The symbolism isn’t exactly subtle as Laura learns to break free of her polite good-girl upbringing and embrace those roiling emotions.
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