Tumblr’s movie of the year.
He has fur, fangs, and glowing eyes, but the scariest thing about Your Monster is how much he tells the truth. Not to the other characters – they barely know he exists – but to us, the audience, who are never quite sure whether we’re watching a fantasy, a psychotic break, or just a particularly dark allegory for co-dependency and repressed trauma. Like Fight Club if the crisis was emotional authenticity, not toxic masculinity, Caroline Lindy’s feature debut asks what happens when the part of yourself you’ve spent years locking in a cupboard decides it’s had enough and kicks the bloody door down.
Melissa Barrera plays Laura with a sense of fragile composure always one note away from collapse. Recently dumped by her long-term partner Jacob (Edmund Donovan), who stuck around through her cancer diagnosis only to discard her just as she began to heal, Laura finds herself living alone in their now-former shared flat – which is, as it turns out, haunted. Or maybe infested. Or maybe it’s just her. The Monster (played by Tommy Dewey) is every inch the creature from under the bed, except he talks like a blunt therapist with claws, and he doesn’t just lurk: he enables. And not in the self-harm sense, but in the “mirror held up to the soul” actualising one. He wants Laura to connect with her rage; to be angry. And she wants to stay civilised. For a while.
The push-pull between Laura and the Monster is the film’s thematic engine. His grotesqueness is oddly comforting, and not for nothing, designed with just enough lupine carnality to make Tumblr’s monster-enamoured set sit up and take notice, a fuzzy embodiment of the fury and self-worth she’s been encouraged to bury under passive-aggressive platitudes and professional stagecraft. Is he real? That question hangs over the film like a tattered velvet curtain. Other people never see him. He doesn’t interact with the world unless Laura is watching. And yet – the consequences of his actions ripple outward in ways that might be metaphor, might be murder.
Lindy leans into that ambiguity with glee, refusing to settle the question even when blood is spilled and the fourth wall is practically gouged. Like Fight Club, Your Monster isn’t really about the twist – it’s about what the twist enables. In both cases, it allows a fractured protagonist to externalise a roiling, repressed truth and then pretend the horror that follows wasn’t entirely their idea. But while Fincher’s film couches its masculine fears in slick nihilism, Lindy builds something stranger and more intimate: a horror-romcom hybrid where the creature is as much conscience as id.
Tonally, it walks a very fine line and rarely stumbles. It’s funny without undercutting itself, angry without melodrama, and sharply written enough to make its big swings feel earned. The musical theatre setting adds a layer of ironic self-awareness without dipping into smugness, and the climactic number is both a literal showstopper and a figurative reckoning. By the time Laura takes centre stage, smeared in implications and blinking through the spotlights, it’s unclear whether we’re watching a breakdown, a breakthrough, or both. The horror isn’t just what the Monster might do – it’s what Laura might have always been capable of.
Barrera is electric, playing Laura as someone who’s performed likability so long, she no longer recognises herself without it. Her chemistry with the Monster is thick with queasy intimacy, sometimes flirtatious, sometimes combative, always bristling with the uneasy charge of two beings who might be the same person wearing different masks. Donovan, meanwhile, keeps Jacob just smarmy enough to merit the symbolic parallels the script draws between him and the Monster – despite being played by different actors. One has a script; the other is all subtext.
Your Monster never deigns to answer its central question definitively. It doesn’t need to. The tension between the metaphorical and the literal is where the film draws its power, its black-hearted humour, and its strange catharsis. Whether Laura conjured her Monster or merely stopped pretending he wasn’t there all along is, in a way, irrelevant. She needed him. She made him. She might be him. And when the curtain falls, it’s not the applause that matters, it’s the liberation of having finally freed the beast.
