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Your Monster Needs More Than an Outstanding Melissa Barrera
The script isn’t much, but the actress shines in this quaint little semi-musical monster-movie rom-com.
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. 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. 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.
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