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‘Your Monster’ Review: A Miscast Melissa Barrera Bonds With the Beast Under Her Bed
Caroline Lindy's mopey Sundance midnight movie doesn't make much of its horror premise, focusing on a woe-is-me actor's plot to get back at her ex.
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. Unique as the premise may sound, “Your Monster” proves frustratingly obvious as its furious heroine works up the nerve to unleash her id (which is a lot less satisfying when presented as a grouchy companion than if she had a full transformation, à la “Cat People” or “Ginger Snaps”).
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