Feminine rage has been enjoying a bit of a moment onscreen in the past few years — see also films such as Promising Young Woman and Birds of Prey — and it’s about bloody time. Your Monster is the latest in this mini cinematic trend, but it’s the first such movie that’s actually kinda sweet in how it goes about this. Oh, the humor here is bitter, and the horror comes at you from unexpected angles, for sure. And the overriding genre is perhaps “anti-romance.” But the only thing that makes it “anti” is that it’s about its female protagonist learning to love and respect herself, to put her own needs first.
There’s a monster in Laura’s (Melissa Barrera: In the Heights) closet, see, and the monster is her. A manifestation of her own psyche. Of her loneliness. Of her anger. A 20something actor in New York City, Laura has just been dumped by her boyfriend as she is recovering from cancer surgery. (It happens so frequently that men abandon their female partners who receive serious medical diagnoses that nurses know to prepare their women patients for the possibility. The “based on a true-ish story” alert that opens the film is an allusion to that very indignity befalling filmmaker Caroline Lindy.) Her best friend, fellow actor Mazie (Kayla Foster), is constantly off to the gym or an audition even though she assured Laura that “ride or die, [she’d be] here” for hugs or a cheer-up hangout. Even Laura’s own mother is entirely absent (Mom never appears), just leaves Laura some cash and carbs to help healing as Laura recuperates in her childhood home.
Laura is living with a pile-on of shit. And now she is living with Monster (Tommy Dewey: The Front Runner, Step Up Revolution), who starts out as a terrible roommate annoyed with her presence and morphs into a good friend. Turns out he’s into Shakespeare, and they bond over old movies and Chinese takeout. He makes her tea! He’s kind of hot for a monster, and becomes a huge cheerleader for her as she begins to emerge back into the world. He’s funny and charming, and it’s deeply sexy and seductive how he sees her — genuinely sees and understand her — and supports her. The way he slips under her bed at night, monster-style, to stay close and keep her company? That’s one of those unexpectedly sweet moments. The way he is the perfect boyfriend? That is, alas, the real make-believe. (There are big Beauty & the Beast vibes here, specifically the 1980s romantic fantasy TV series starring Linda Hamilton and Ron Perlman.)
Yes, of course, it’s all Laura, all the time: this is female empowerment in the romance of loving yourself, in a woman taking control of her own life in a meaningful way, and in finally giving in, with Monster’s encouragement, to the fury she has been subsuming. She has a lot of unfinished business, professional and personal, with her ex, Jacob (Edmund Donovan: Civil War), who’d promised her the leading role in the stage musical he was writing — that she helped him write! — a project he has now also snatched from her. “It’s not okay” how he treated her; Monster gives her this as a mantra to take to heart. How she resolves her relationship with Jacob explodes as a kind of grand and, well, monstrous performance art. It’s hilarious and shocking and one of the more audacious things I’ve onscreen in a long while.
Your Monster takes us through some wild tonal shifts, but writer-director Lindy, making her feature debut with an expansion of her 2020 short of the same name, pulls it off, casting women’s lives and the everyday bullshit we endure as both comedy and tragedy, as romance and horror. That musical that Jacob wrote? It’s about the straitjacket of being the “good girl” that all women are socialized to be. This is a hugely original and grimly delightful smashdown of that. It’s a roar that women are mad as hell, and we’re not gonna take it anymore.
more films like this:
• The Dressmaker [Prime US | Apple TV]
• The Babadook [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Kanopy US | Mubi US | Netflix]
