SPOILER ALERT: This post contains details from Your Monster.
Your Monster takes audiences on a fun, romantic and spooky ride just in time for Halloween, but some viewers might want clarification on the ending.
Writer and director Caroline Lindy, who makes her feature debut with the film playing now in theaters, told Deadline that despite the precarious ending, she imagines Laura (Melissa Barrera) and Monster (Tommy Dewey) “riding off into the sunset together.”
Based on Lindy’s 2019 short, the film follows soft-spoken actor Laura Franco, who is dumped by her longtime boyfriend Jacob (Edmund Donovan) while recovering from surgery and retreats to her childhood home. With her future looking bleak, insult is added to injury when Laura discovers her ex is staging a musical that she helped him develop. But out of these gut-wrenching life changes emerges a Monster with whom she finds a connection, encouraging Laura to follow her dreams, open her heart and fall in love with her inner rage.
The final scene sees Laura take centerstage for her Broadway debut, covered in blood with her ex’s mutilated body lying behind her and no Monster in sight. While Jacob’s death is not shown onscreen, viewers are left to wonder whether the Monster really did it or if he was a figment of Laura’s imagination all along.
“I think the monster is real to her,” said Lindy. “And this is a fairy tale, you know, I’m not advocating for people to go murder their ex-boyfriends. But in this fairytale monster musical horror rom-com, we get to kill off the toxicity in our life and Laura has created this manifestation of her anger as this handsome charming Monster who can do her bidding for her.”
Taylor Trensch, Megan Masako Haley, Edmund Donovan, Kayla Foster, Melissa Barrera, Caroline Lindy, Tommy Dewey and Meghann Fahy attend the Your Monster premiere on Oct. 24, 2024 in New York City. (Steven Ferdman/Getty Images)
Lindy continued, “So to me, Monster is real to her. And I’ve always imagined Monster and Laura riding off into the sunset together. I don’t see Laura going to jail. That’s not this type of movie. Emotionally, she has said ‘I’m not gonna let people treat me this way anymore. So, ex-boyfriends, you’re dead to me. And you didn’t know that I have a sexy Monster who is going to rip your throat out.’”
Describing the film as a “comfy, cozy and campy fairytale” based on a “true-ish” story, Lindy was inspired to make the film not only by her love of Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner’s era of romantic comedies, but by her own life-changing experience with cancer.
“I kept on thinking about this time where I was struggling so much,” explained Lindy. “It’s kind of a moment in my life where I really developed this relationship with my anger for the first time, and I kind of fell in love with the side of myself that had been dormant for most of my life. It was kind of like I fell in love with my monster. And I was like, ‘That’s a cute idea for a rom-com.’”
