2025 | rated R | starring Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Christian Convery, Sarah Levy | directed by Osgood Perkins | 1h 38m | 4 out of 5 stars |
The Monkey is a very fun movie made from a story with very little in terms of rules. It’s a killer monkey. Turn the key, someone dies. That’s it. For his second film in 12 months (following the star-making thriller Longlegs), director Osgood Perkins leans hard into that theme. The randomness of it all, the absurdity and cruelty of death. It’s something that will happen to all of us and it gets talked about very little. Perkins’ way of talking about it is to laugh where another horror movie would allow in “trauma”. The deaths are absurd, over-the-top and cartoonishly funny in a Final Destination sort of way – had that series not lost its way in misdirection and increasingly convoluted Rube Goldberg fate traps.
Based on a novella from Stephen King, The Monkey has all the usual hallmarks of a King adaptation that Perkins delivers with such fresh style you won’t notice how much this story is like a lot of others. It’s The Monkey’s Paw without a Be Careful What You Wish For theme. It’s about two twins, Hal and Bill, played by Christian Convery (Sweet Tooth) in dual role as kids and Theo James in dual role as adults. Hal and Bill discover a cymbal-playing monkey toy among their late father’s things and accidently unleash a series of outlandish death directed at everyone around them. True to all King adaptations, the world around them is cruel. Hal is bullied at school by girls and neglected at home by his mother (Tatiana Maslany). True to King adaptations the movie follows a time jump of young kids and their adult self, however Perkins grants us a reprieve of endless flashbacks and simply cuts the movie in half where the 2nd half picks up with adult Hal, a massive loser about to lose custody of his son and terrified that the monkey will come back and he will be responsible for more death.
The movie is stylish, snappy, very funny and a lot of fun. Maybe the biggest annoyance in it is Hal as an adult. He’s such a loser, he’s so inert and reluctant as a character that it’s unclear how he ever got married and had a child in the first place. He’s a terrible father who is physically incapable of relating to his son, and while at first the movie seems like it is all about fathers – as everyone in it has an absentee one – it’s ultimately as much a story about mothers in a way that’s kind of poignant through the chaos.
Like the first Final Destination, The Monkey depicts death as a force that is all around us, that effects all of us and that we never talk about and gives us that bitter pill with the chaser of a goofy horror movie. This movie embraces the sheer anarchism of it all, in ways both funny and shocking. Unlike the more convoluted Longlegs, that feels so stuffed with ideas that it starts to get away from Perkins toward the end, The Monkey is his most solid film to date. There is a bitterness to it that laughs in the face of death, and it’s all just weird and off kilter enough to make for a future cult classic.