The Monkey: Review

The Monkey:

Directed: Osgood Perkins Written by: Osgood Perkins, Stephen King (Short Story in The Skeleton Crew) Cast: Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien

Featuring: Elijah Wood, Sarah Levy, Osgood Perkins

The Monkey is a dark, depraved, delightfully disturbing comedy masquerading as a horror movie, and if you know that before you go into it, you just might love it. There’s something very interesting about Osgood Perkins managing to take his comedic roots and twist them into sinister humour. This movie has the same visual stylings as its predecessor, Longlegs, except it’s loaded with caustic wit and kills that are so gritty and…bodily. This film holds no qualms that its focal point is about a killer monkey; we get no background story, no mythology. We just have to accept that a deadbeat dad left behind a macabre monkey, and his twin boys found it and decided to play with it.

It’s NOT a toy.

We get exactly what it says on the box: “Like Life.” It doesn’t beat to anyone's drum but its own; it doesn't take requests, it has no selection process, it’s chaos wrapped up in a hyper-realistic little drummer with teeth that look all too genuine, black fur and nails with so much texture you’d think they were…real. We have no idea what gives this thing power; all we know is, if the key gets turned in its creepy demonic little back (NOT A TOY), then all hell will break loose.

This film has no substance, there are no lessons here, no tidy morals, and no valuable antidotes that you will be able to pass on, and that’s exactly why it works.  It’s the feel-good movie of the year if feeling good means laughing at the sheer absurdity of life, a wicked, uproarious joyride of chaos where humour and terror bang like drums, relentlessly pounding and difficult to ignore.

Everything is an accident, and everyone dies. That’s the premise. It’s all an accident, but also, nothing is an accident, and also, we all die. This is the message we receive from Hal and Bill's mother, brilliantly portrayed by Tatiana Maslany while she’s giving her twin boys a facetious yet wildly inappropriate speech about death after the first kill. The fact of the matter is, we don’t get to know the whys, or the hows, or the whens, just the truth of it, that is it comes for all of us, it’s our universal truth, what we all have in common. Everyone dies, and boy, do they ever.

The single greatest speech on death of all time.

Osgood has an interesting touch to horror; Longlegs was a weird, carnal film about a serial killer absorbed in religious affliction. The movie was off-putting but just jarring enough to keep your eyes peeled on the screen. The Monkey has a similar effect, except it’s not left field, it’s as far out of the park as you can get.

He took Stephen King’s short story in ‘Skeleton Crew’ and went bananas with it. This movie became a one-two punch, each kill, similar to how ‘death’ comes in the Final Destination universe, one-ups the previous one, leaving your jaw dropped and your brain asking what the fuck you just watched. It’s morbid, it’s nutty, and it’s incredibly well acted. Theo James does a fantastic job playing twin brothers. Hal, the timid brother. He’s absorbed in what he’s done in life, living in solitude after the destruction The Monkey caused in his childhood. His brother Bill is more of a villainous trope; he’s like a bad Batman degenerate you love to watch fail, he’s a weak grown-up Kevin McCallister, but without the parental love. He’s not menacing, he’s not diabolical, he’s a sad man masked by the brink of insanity, and he relishes in it. James plays both roles exceptionally well, and we finally get to see the range behind his pretty face. His child counterpart, Christian Convery, also does an excellent job portraying the twins, to the point where, at one point, I thought it was two different actors. The two actors did an excellent job mirroring each other’s mannerisms. Shout out to Colin O’Brien, too; he did a great job playing a conflicted teenager, with no hesitation to show pain and great comedic timing.

This movie has fantastic cinematography, a high-budget indie movie from the 90s. Each kill is visually appalling and works well with the underlying theme of the movie. In the short story, the theme is about childhood trauma that lingers through adulthood. The movie takes this and turns the trauma into grief, and each story of grief is highlighted by another angle of it—their father abandoned them, and then one by one, everyone they know gets viciously and hilariously murdered by chance. ’ Freak accidents. Hal passes this grief onto his son by more or less abandoning him, too. Bill passes it to the world as he’s led by a corrupted mind. It’s familial trauma masked by people exploding on your screen, drenched in the absurdity of life and good old-fashioned 80s splatter.

In the end, The Monkey isn’t about understanding. It’s about witnessing, it’s about accepting. Osgood didn’t just adapt a King story, he dissected it, warped it and stitched it back together into something playful and unhinged. It’s a film that will allow you to laugh in the face of logic, only here to remind us that the real punchline to life is that none of us make it out of here alive.