If Ann Landers had it right, and hanging on to resentment amounts to letting someone you despise live rent-free in your head, then “Your Monster” is what happens when you kick open the door and let those feelings run amok. Drawing from personal experience, writer-director Caroline Lindy delivers a clumsy metaphor of a movie, in which a promising young actor named Laura Franco (“In the Heights” star Melissa Barrera) has her Broadway dreams derailed by a cancer diagnosis, only to discover a ferocious inner strength, courtesy of the beastly creature she finds hanging around her childhood home.

In what amounts to a heavy-handed empowerment tale, the monster in question is at first a surly roommate, later a potential love interest and ultimately a manifestation of Laura’s long-suppressed sense of rage. The symbolism isn’t exactly subtle as Laura learns to break free of her polite good-girl upbringing and embrace those roiling emotions.