Film Reviews

‘The Monkey’ Review: Osgood Perkins’ Midnight Movie Bloodbath is Caught Between Gruesome Irony and Flat Melodrama [C]

Trace Sauveur February 14, 2025

Death looms like a specter in nearly all of Osgood Perkins’ films. Consider the chilly threat of the beyond in The Blackcoat’s Daughter, the dark fairy-tale whimsy of Gretel & Hansel, or the satanic fatalism of his 2024 viral breakout hit Longlegs, released just seven months ago. For much of the wider viewing public, Longlegs was their first taste of Perkins’ macabre, slightly oddball sensibilities—a fusion of the droning dread found in Japanese horror procedurals like Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure and moments of humor so bitter they could easily be mistaken for earnestly depraved inklings from the stray corners of Perkins’ psyche.

The ambivalent inevitability of our demise continues to underpin his work in The Monkey, but in a decidedly different way. It transforms his perverse fascination with death into a gooey, gory midnight movie fueled by self-awareness and (often literally) explosive violence. If Perkins’ impishness was once veiled behind solemn unease, here it’s fully unleashed, revealing a playfulness that undercuts his usual po-faced seriousness.

That’s all well and good, but in practice, The Monkey feels like a one-trick pony, its trivial narrative serving mostly as an excuse to string together a series of shocking death sequences. That’s not inherently a flaw, but Perkins’ script too clearly reflects its origins as a stretched-out adaptation of Stephen King’s short story. That’s to say that while The Monkey has its spells of darkly amusing pleasure, it constantly feels like it could have been a short film, or even an anthology.

To his credit, Perkins broadens the relatively abrupt original story with a clear understanding and admiration for that specific King tone, as well as expands on his arsenal of pet themes. He has also found a worthy King protagonist in Theo James as Hal, an actor whose voice-over narration recalls the cozy storytelling of Richard Dreyfuss in Stand by Me. Hal’s predicament, however, is far more dire than young Gordie Lachance and friends’: the reappearance of an ominous wind-up monkey that spells gruesome death whenever it bangs its drum. Hal thought he and his twin brother Bill (also played by James as an adult, with both portrayed by Christian Convery as children) had escaped its curse years ago, having thrown it down a well after the sudden, brutal deaths of their babysitter and mother during an extended first act. Now estranged as adults, the brothers find themselves in communication when strange deaths draw Hal back to his sleepy rural Maine hometown, as he looks to put a stop to things once and for all.

Also along for the ride is Hal’s similarly distant son Petey (Colin O’Brien), whom he has kept at arm’s length for his entire life out of fear that the killer toy monkey would return and put a hit out on him. Again, all those familiar King motifs—familial alienation, childhood trauma, death as an active and impending doom—are alive and well in The Monkey, and thus will satiate those looking for a dose of the legendary genre maestro’s recognizable modes of horror and drama. The problem is that they’re caught between sincerity and spoof, as Perkins’ screenplay attempts to wrangle earnest generational family conflict into a film that otherwise leans toward caricature.

That deadpan approach does yield a few laughs, particularly in the matter-of-fact dispatching of each Final Destination-esque splatter set piece and the characters’ somewhat mortified yet oddly blasé reactions to them. The world of The Monkey seems to exist as a nutty mirror to our own, where the supernatural and grotesque aren’t all that removed from the standard state of affairs, the string of deaths shocking but manageable. Perkins devises some delectably nasty methods of execution (this lady can’t just have her head on fire with a face full of fishhooks—she has to be horribly impaled by something, too!), but the comic shock of seeing bodies erupt into torrents of red mist and chunks of flesh eventually loses its luster. The film also features a slew of entertaining detours with welcome cameo players, including Adam Scott in a deliciously kitschy prologue and Elijah Wood as the biggest blowhard stepfather in the world. These moments are fun but, like much of the film, fleeting.

More problematically, the film’s detached self-awareness often leans into self-satisfaction, giving it an air of “I’m too good to be here.” Juxtaposed against a flimsy story treated with sincerity, The Monkey suffers from an identity crisis, constantly flipping between two modes that each have their own glaring issues.

James keeps the narrative afloat with his dual role, nicely adjusting between the guileless Hal and the more shifty Bill, but it’s that little monkey that provides the film with its most memorable imagery. A great prop can do a lot for a horror movie, and the titular menace here is a marvelously creepy piece of production design, heightening tension with its huge, watchful eyes and bestial smile, always on the verge of claiming its next victim. Cinematographer Nico Aguilar frames it to make its presence feel larger than life, enhancing its uncanny quality—especially in moments like a stripper whose head has been replaced with the monkey’s. The Monkey has a fair bit to say about the bleak inevitability of death and the cruel randomness with which the universe exerts its will upon us mere mortals. For generous B-horror fans, the shock-value freak accidents that convey these thematic preoccupations may be enough. Perkins’ direction, bolstered by a strong visual effects team, delivers some striking set pieces. But the film is ultimately caught between death as a sick joke and life as hackneyed melodrama, unable to reconcile the two. Death comes for us all but The Monkey seems confused about where to draw the line between that being a meaningful idea, or one primed for sadistic glee.

Grade: C

NEON will release The Monkey only in theaters on February 21.