Your Monster is a multi-genre tale of feminine rage and self-love. When New York City actress Laura Franco is dumped by her boyfriend Jacob while she undergoes cancer treatment, her life hits an all-time low.
Laura returns home only to discover a monster living upstairs in her closet. Unbeknownst to her, Monster will be the key to Laura strengthening her self-love and unleashing her inner rage.
Director/writer Caroline Lindy spoke to us about this dazzling, genre-fusing adventure and how she hopes audiences will respond to the ending.
Disclaimer: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
LadyJenevia: I had a lot of fun with this film because I live in a perpetual state of feminine rage. It was a very well suited match. I do want to foray into some spoilers because I really want to pick your brain about this story. I watched it and I went, ‘Oh, Monster is Laura and Laura is Monster. The love story is a story of self-love.’ Did you always intend to play with surrealism when you were developing the film’s narrative?
Lindy: Yes, this was always, from the very beginning, a story about self-love. It’s based on an experience of mine, a personal experience where I fell in love with my own Monster. This was always going to be a story about a woman falling in love with her inner beast. In the world of the movie, he is a manifestation of her rage in the form of a handsome charming closet-monster. It originated from this very personal relationship I developed with myself. It always came from this weird, surreal, very internal place.
LadyJenevia: I want to quickly share one of my Letterboxd reviews of the film which was, ‘Inception, but for the musical theatre kids.’ I described it as such because I feel like the ending is one of those endings where it could potentially be divisive, in a fun way. It gets people talking and arguing about what it means. From your authorial perspective, is there supposed to be a clear ending or is it meant to be ambiguous?
Lindy: I personally like movies that leave endings open for interpretation. It’s fun to debate about what you think the director or writer was intending to do after the movie ends. I always wanted to make it kind of open and ambiguous. I obviously have my own feelings about the ending and what I think happens. How fun is it if everyone gets to leave the theatre feeling something different about the ending? They can leave the story with their own specific relationship to what happened, and decide for themselves.
LadyJenevia: Can you speak a bit about the importance of indie film making where you actually have the space and freedom to take risks and be more surreal and combine so many genres? It feels like something that would not happen with a lot of what you see with these risk-averse, big-budget studio films that are a bit more corporate as opposed to artistic.
Lindy: Independent cinema is the place to experiment. That’s the beauty of making a smaller budget film without the restrictions of a big studio. You can try things that are a little bit riskier. It’s scary because there’s always that potential that you might crash and burn but how fun is it to try something new? I love romantic comedies and I think we’re living in an age where the classic romcom doesn’t really fit and work for today’s more knowledgeable audiences.
Based on my own experience, I thought this story could work really well by fusing all these different genres together and really trying something new. It’s a classic story about a girl falling in love with something. It just happens to be she’s falling in love with herself. She’s falling in love with the side of herself that she thinks is shameful and grotesque in some way. It lent itself to all these wacky genres that I thought could could work together really well.
Some people are probably going to really love that I combined a lot of genres. Some people are going to see it as different and scary and bizarre, and that’s totally okay.
LadyJenevia: Thank you so much for your time, Caroline. Congratulations on the film and to everybody who worked on it. It was fantastic to watch and I hope more people will fall in love with it the way that I did.
Lindy: Thank you, that means the world.
Watch my full interviews with Your Monster stars Edmund Donovan, Kayla Foster, and director/screenwriter Caroline Lindy here:
Watch my full review of Your Monster here:
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