Sundance 2024 Review: YOUR MONSTER, Genre-Bending Showcase for Director and Star

The words “bold,” “audacious,” and “daring” can be easily tossed around whenever a new-to-us filmmaker makes their feature-length debut, but in writer-director Caroline Lindy’s case, they’re more than applicable.

They fall short of accurately describing Lindy’s deliriously entertaining, genre-bending first effort, Your Monster. A smash-up of multiple genres and sub-genres (horror, fantasy, musical, and more), Your Monster should launch Lindy’s filmmaking career for the next decade or two without reservation, hesitation, or doubt.

Based, in part, on Lindy’s personal experiences and expanded from her 2020 proof-of-concept short, Your Monster focuses on Laura Franco (Melissa Barrera), a down-and-out performer facing a series of personal Job-like drawbacks and obstacles, beginning with a surprise cancer diagnosis and continuing with her longtime boyfriend and composer, Jacob (Edmund Donovan), abruptly leaving her as she recovers from much-needed surgery. To add insult to injury, Laura’s long-promised role as the lead in Jacob’s upcoming musical — a musical she helped create — evaporates the moment he walks out of her hospital room.

Emotionally and physically battered and bruised, but not quite broken, Laura retreats to her absent mother’s Brooklyn brownstone. There, with the on-again, off-again help of her so-called “best friend,” Mazie (Kayla Foster), Laura takes the first, tentative steps toward recovery.

Unluckily for Laura, her childhood home isn’t completely unoccupied: the otherwise unnamed closet/bed Monster (Thomas Dewey, reprising his role from Lindy's short) who periodically terrorized Laura as a preteen, hasn’t moved out and he’s far from happy when he runs into a startled Laura on her first night back in her mother’s house.

Effortlessly shifting from downbeat relationship drama (Laura and Jacob), Your Monster morphs into a roommate-related comedy, with Laura, less and less afraid of the Monster, and the Monster, a lonely, irascible curmudgeon, agrees to a tentative truce. The Monster evolves from a bad, no-good, terrible roommate to the emotionally supportive friend Laura didn't know she needed and eventually, possibly something more. In a key scene filled with visual wit, dramatic pathos, and a fair bit of physical comedy, the stay-at-home Monster emerges from the safety of his closet to join Laura in a Bride of Frankenstein costume at a Halloween party.

That the Monster represents a projection of Laura’s fears and anxieties and is not real is a given, but in time, he helps Laura regain her broken sense of self and her self-confidence, convincing her to audition for Jacob’s musical against all odds (and all common sense). That, in turn, shifts Your Monster genre-wise once again, expanding Laura’s world from the suffocating confines of her mother’s brownstone to that of a backstage musical, complete with the return of Jacob; a much more famous rival, Jackie Dennon (Meghann Fahy); and (the not) best friend Mazie in a key role.

With so many genre switch-ups in under two hours, tonal shifts are all but inevitable. Lindy handles those potentially abrupt tonal shifts like a filmmaker with five or ten feature-length films to her credit.

Lindy seems comfortable working with and in practically every genre or sub-genre too. From horror to fantasy, from relationship drama to roommate comedy, and from backstage musical back to horror, Lindy rarely missteps (if she missteps at all). It takes a supremely confident filmmaker to make as many genre and tonal changes in their feature-length debut, but at least where Lindy is concerned, it’s more than earned. Based on the results, it’s deserved too.

Lindy also elicits top-shelf performances from her cast, beginning with a career-best Barrera and continuing through Thomas Dewey as the mercurial monster and every member of the cast, small, large, or even marginal. Barrera gets the opportunity to show the full range of her abilities as a performer (e.g., drama, comedy, singing) and she never falters. That’s both a credit to Barrera’s underused talents and Lindy’s fully formed skills as a filmmaker. More like this, please.

Your Monster premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. It is still seeking distribution.