The Monkey Reveals Some Feeling Beneath Its Torrents of Splat-stick Blood

Last we saw the horror filmmaker Osgood Perkins, he was experiencing his biggest-ever mainstream success with a movie that took some famous genre touchstones like The Silence of the Lambs and The X-Files and made them feel, somehow, remote and uncanny again, recapturing their ’90s-era atmosphere while letting the freakiness fly off in a different tonal direction. Longlegs was also a big, unlikely hit – a Satanic pop song with black comedy just barely peeking out from its edges. That unsettling feeling of wrongness, that more obtuse depiction of the characters’ humanity, alongside the atmosphere of his earlier films, add up to Perkins seeming like a counterintuitive choice for something as direct and market-driven as another Stephen King adaptation.

For a while, The Monkey seems to bear this incongruity out. Hal Shelburn (Theo James) narrates the story of a childhood spent with his sadistic bully of a twin brother Bill (also James as an adult; both boys are played by Christian Convery as kids) and their discovery of a toy monkey that, when wound up, seems to cause random, horrific accidents in its vicinity. It’s Final Destination without a clear chain of command, and Perkins’ screenplay adapts King’s voice almost to distraction; it’s not full-on cornpone (nor is King’s writing, most of the time), but it’s voice-y and a little affected in a way that the quiet of Longlegs was not, a testament to how much mystery a horror movie can retain simply by keeping quiet. Longlegs was disquieting; The Monkey has the adjacent but not exactly the same effect of giving pause: Wait, is this serious? And then another: If not, is this even funny?

At first, it’s not exactly either, save for perhaps the Rube Goldberg demises, and the truly inventive degree of gore that inevitably comes rushing through the ends of death scenes like a gnarly flood. Even these gorehound punchlines are sometimes undercut by the sheer number of caricatured King-isms, recognizable even to casual fans: Bill’s over-the-top bullying, reminiscent of so many King stories of adolescence, here improbably relocated to a home where both boys are watched over by caring mother Lois (Tatiana Maslany); the additional bullying of even less nuanced side characters; the classic evil object, here further reduced of any movement beyond the mechanical wind-up and smack of those fake drums; the overt references to other works, like a character named for Misery’s Annie Wilkes. Then there are jokes that may not belong to King but whose cartooniness makes the broader characterizations seem vaguely bad-faith, like an impossibly young-looking pastor who is – again, highly improbably – unable to keep himself from muttering shocked profanities during a supremely undercooked eulogy. Is hearing “fuck” in an unlikely location as good as this stuff can get?

And yet as the clockwork dark-comedy shocks of The Monkey continue, something arguably even stranger happens. Does it count as a spoiler to recount the ways that the movie not only improves in its final stretch, but coalesces, and starts to feel savvier and more complex than it initially seems? (Hopefully not; the plot mechanics that lead there, I confess to barely remembering.) The patented King elements edge toward parody, like someone wanted to make fun of the adolescent reminiscence of Stand By Me (or, in King’s original novella, The Body) and thought the most expedient way would be to combine it with stylized childhood hell of It, annihilating the sincerity of both with body-pulverizing slasher-style deaths. Then, as the movie feels increasingly and more explicitly like a Stephen King spoof, Perkins also somehow teases from the mayhem a sense of free-floating anxiety, especially as Hal struggles to reconnect with his adolescent son Petey (Colin O’Brien). Hal has had minimal contact with his kid, out of fear that the monkey’s curse will claim him – and then a last-gasp-of-custody road trip coincides with the reappearance of the long-dormant monkey in Hal’s life, which also brings his long-estranged brother out of the woodwork. Again, this storyline comes on beyond broad, with the cutesy name and an over-the-top smarm-machine stepdad (Elijah Wood, overdoing it) who dispenses parenting advice. Somehow, maybe because the movie’s most ridiculous elements serve as a sleight-of-hand distraction,  genuine resonance creeps in.

The movie doesn’t exactly conceal that the monkey toy, by “choosing” people in relatively close proximity but without any further detectable rhyme or reason, is standing in for the cruel randomness of death, the fact that a freak demise could be waiting for us around any corner. But as the movie digs into Hal and Bill’s differing forms of anxiety over that inevitability, The Monkey steers away from the realm of pure horror-comedy japery or specific Stephen King piss-take, and becomes in its haunted way, an affecting coda to the dark joke of life’s potential meaninglessness. Perkins, the son of actor Anthony Perkins, lost both his parents decades ago (his mother was killed in one of the flights on 9/11) and although he has too much experience as a horror showman to deny the audience a gruesome blood circus, he allows an ache to emerge from the spectacle, even from performances that initially seem a little too heightened to work as fully human characters. The canary in the coal mine is Maslany, who lays enough groundwork in her early scenes for the movie to eventually circle back to something more reflective.

That the movie does so without really letting up on its initially contraption-like cheap thrills and self-satisfied transgressions is almost more satisfying than if The Monkey had felt more like a “real” movie to begin with. It’s a little too blunt to call it a magic trick – and a ultimately too reflective about the psychology of grief to call it a blunt-force attack. What sometimes resembles a goof on Stephen King becomes a form of tribute to the author’s ability to mine terror from the mere facts of living.

Director: Osgood Perkins
Writer: Osgood Perkins
Starring: Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell, Sarah Levy, Elijah Wood, Adam Scott
Release Date: February 21, 2025

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.