The Monkey (dir. Osgood Perkins)

by Jack Martin | Feb 19, 2025

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 97 mins

UK Distributor: Black Bear Films

UK Release Date: 21 February 2025

WHO’S IN THE MONKEY?

Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Elijah Wood, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell, Sarah Levy, Nicco Del Rio, Oz Perkins, Christian Convery, Adam Scott

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Osgood Perkins (director, writer), Dave Caplan, Michael Clear, Chris Ferguson, Brian Kavanagh-Jones and James Wan (producers), Nico Aguilar (cinematographer), Graham Fortin and Greg Ng (editors)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A cursed toy monkey causes bloody chaos…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON THE MONKEY?

Last year, writer-director Osgood Perkins left audiences completely terrified with the outstandingly freaky Longlegs, a film that successfully answered the question, “what if The Silence of the Lambs was an actual horror film?” But for his immediate follow-up, an adaptation of Stephen King’s short story The Monkey, Perkins is answering a completely different question: “can I not only out-Final Destination all other Final Destination movies in existence, but also make it legitimately and unapologetically funny?”

The answer isn’t as straightforward as it was with Longlegs. While that film just oozed bleak evilness from every orifice, this one is a much odder beast to dissect, as it carries a significantly more comedic tone – albeit one as dark as a coalmine at nighttime – but with the same nihilistic mentality and flair for the bizarre that gives it a dry and even unnatural personality. Sometimes that’s put to good use, other times not as much, but one thing’s for sure about The Monkey: as idiosyncratic as the film may be, almost to a fault, it is a suitably demented ride that embraces its pitch-black nature in every single possible way.

Beginning in 1999, the film begins with twin brothers Hal and Bill (both played by Christian Convery) discovering an unusual relic among the possessions of their absent father (played by a cameoing Adam Scott in the opening scene). It is, of course, the titular monkey: a toy, to be precise, one that plays the drums when the key in its back is turned around, but every time it does, people die. Horribly. Like something out of a twisted Herschell Gordon Lewis movie, where people are beheaded, trampled into pure paste, blown into tiny fragments, and so much more.

Needless to say, the brothers soon rid themselves of it, and things seem well enough for the next quarter-century, though an adult Hal (Theo James) – now estranged from Bill (also James) – has isolated himself from everyone, even his teenage son Petey (Colin O’Brien), out of caution in case the monkey ever comes back to resume its killing spree. Naturally, it does, which soon brings the brothers back together in, shall we say, very unexpected circumstances as Hal attempts to be rid of the killer toy once and for all.

As often is the case with Stephen King, the story sounds completely ridiculous on paper and isn’t that much less so in execution. However, Perkins leans into the ridiculousness rather than steering clear of it, avoiding what most other filmmakers do when making strait-laced adaptations of King’s stories, especially ones that are inherently silly from the concept up. Perkins, and by extension his audience, knows all too well that the idea of a killer toy monkey is funnier than it is scary, so the filmmaker emphasises the former emotion as much as he can within his own stylistic realm, creating a film that seems unashamed of its barmy premise and goes the extra mile to match the wacky implications from such a concept.

Case in point, the numerous deaths in this movie are some of the most bonkers and hilariously calculated of their kind since, well, the Final Destination movies. Perkins laces scenes of people meeting the most outlandishly gruesome deaths you can imagine with slapstick and comedic timing straight out of a Tom and Jerry cartoon, while at no point asking the audience to take any of it seriously, even when major characters we’ve already spent a decent amount of time with fall victim to the monkey and its sinister ways. The increasingly over-the-top nature in which people are gruesomely offed almost always earns a heavy, if uncomfortable, chortle from the viewer, often because they come at such suddenness – at one point, even cutting midway through one scene to the funeral of yet another victim – that you almost always have no choice but to laugh.

However, there are times when you can tell that Perkins isn’t entirely used to a (slightly) lighter tone, as his usual moody approach – seen not just in Longlegs, but in other similarly dour entries like The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Gretel & Hansel – sometimes clashes with the much wackier material. Much of the dialogue is written and delivered with a deadpan matter-of-fact tone, not too dissimilar to Perkins’s previous films, or even the dry stylings of Yorgos Lanthimos and M. Night Shyamalan, which in a film like Longlegs can easily match the unsettling and even unnatural atmosphere in which that particular story takes place.

But in The Monkey, the monotonousness can get in the way of the intended comedic punch. The restricted emotional range of actors like Theo James, who as a general performer isn’t as expressive as a (dual) role like this perhaps demands, is restricted to a single mode, making it hard for the viewer to know when and when not to laugh. Furthermore, while the deadpan nature is occasionally utilised for comedic effect, especially when paired with actors who are giving much more colourful and campier turns (like Elijah Wood who pops up for a single scene as a larger-than-life character straight out of a Coen brothers movie), it sometimes feels like the film is darting in and out of parallel universes, where one is taking everything far more seriously than the other, confusing the overall tone even more. Granted, nobody is expecting naturalism in a film about a toy monkey that kills people via elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions, but perhaps Perkins needed to lighten up ever so slightly in order for both the comedy and horror elements to work better together.

It goes without saying that The Monkey isn’t as much of a slam-dunk for Perkins as Longlegs was. But even then, there’s still enough fun to be had from the absolutely deranged manner in which the filmmaker gets creatively nasty with his kills, as he embraces the borderline cartoonish premise with a seriously twisted sense of humour that does not let up in its insanity, right up to a closing shot that’s as poetically nuts as you could expect from either Osgood Perkins or Stephen King.

SO, TO SUM UP…

The Monkey doesn’t quite hold a banana to writer-director Osgood Perkins’ previous film Longlegs, with the filmmaker’s dour and deadpan style often clashing with the wacky material, but an amusingly twisted sense of humour, especially within a barrage of hilariously gruesome death scenes, makes it a fun enough Stephen King adaptation.