While I advocate for nontraditional rom-coms with a bloodthirsty bite, Your Monster struggles to tame mismatching tones. It's a hairy concept — what happens if your childhood boogeyman has a crush on you? Filmmaker Caroline Lindy approaches "Beauty and the Beast" meet-cutes from a horror protagonist's perspective, but bubbly cuteness detrimentally outweighs the script's darker leanings. Date night sweetness and flesh-torn grotesqueries don't play nice together, which is a downer as the film fails to unify its hybridized approach. The best genre romances find harmony between warmed hearts and spilled guts, while examples like Your Monster fail to earn monstrous moments.

Melissa Barrera is a dream romantic lead as Laura Franco, an actress recovering from a cancer-related surgery. Laura's depressed, having been dumped by her playwright ex-boyfriend Jacob (Edmund Donovan) while still hooked to hospital machines. She holes away in her childhood New York City apartment, wallowing by her lonesome. Here,...