Your Monster

Your Monster is a magical movie experience you do not want to miss. A nice blend of levity and drama, Lindy’s debut assertively makes its mark on the genre.

Your Monster, while falling short of the Critic’s Pick status that Jacob vociferously covets for his show, has its charms, namely the backstage intrigue, onstage songs by the Lazours (of the current Off Broadway musical “We Live in Cairo”), and a disarming lead in Barrera.

Your Monster has some chucklesome moments, none of it enough to paper over the film’s many contrivances. And some late-breaking gruesome bits can’t retroactively redeem the lazy writing. But the movie does have Barrera, and maybe that’s enough.

Lindy’s passion for and connection to the material is obvious (how could it not be?), as is her desire to twist a sad story into something fresh and often funny. Sweet, even! But an unhinged final act, plus a jaw-dropper of a finale, seems at odds with everything else she’s revealed, and this genre-spanner goes from, well, spanning to something else: not being able to hold onto any of its many spinning plates.

Whatever “charms” it reached for vanish for the attempted over-the-top finale, which left me cold and didn’t come close to making the sale about the “Embrace your inner rage” spin this is allegedly about.