by Lisa Nystrom
Worth: $12.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Melissa Barrera, Tommy Dewey, Edmund Donovan, Meghann Fahy
Intro:
… it’s the romance genre’s answer to Drop Dead Fred, albeit less zany.
While fairytales can be divisive, Disney fairytales more than most, one unifying moment for romantics everywhere was the unexpected sense of disappointment that came with watching the Beast disappear into a shower of magic sparks as he transformed into a human prince. Writer/director Caroline Lindy pairs this anti-climactic reveal with another of life’s great heartbreaks—being dumped at your most vulnerable, something she experienced in real life when her partner ended things via text as she recovered from surgery—and turns that sense of disenchantment on its head by using it as a building block for her offbeat romantic comedy.
When Laura (Melissa Barrera) is broken up with while in hospital fighting cancer, she can’t imagine her life getting any worse. Moving back home, she stumbles across an unexpected roommate in the back of her closet: the monster she used to glimpse out of the corner of her eye when she was growing up (played by Tommy Dewey). Turns out he’s very real, very hairy, and very ready to have the house to himself for the first time in his life. Some bickering, bantering, a shared love of classic films and egg rolls, and suddenly the Monster doesn’t mind having Laura around so much, and Laura might have finally found the strength and support that she’s been missing since her life went off the rails.
In a way, it’s the romance genre’s answer to Drop Dead Fred, albeit less zany. After disappearing into the role of Michael O’Donoghue earlier this year in Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, Dewey now disappears beneath a wig, excessive body hair and fangs, and yet his signature snarky humour is on full display. It’s Barrera who truly owns the screen, though. Her final girl credentials in Abigail and the Scream franchise mean that she has a perfect understanding of how to offset Laura’s unassuming sweetness with just a dash of mania and frenzied desperation. While the monster under the bed might be real, it’s the unsettling gleam in Laura’s eye that sets the alarm bells ringing that this fairytale might just be more Grimm than Disney after all.
