THE MONKEY: A Disgustingly Bloody Good Time

Horror movies have quietly become box-office juggernauts in the past few years, an anomaly in the age of streaming. As far as I can tell, horror films are one of the few genres made unequivocally better when watched with a crowd. Even if a film doesn’t affect you, you’re still guaranteed a few chuckles from the guy three seats down wetting his pants at the latest jumpscare. And, when it comes to big-screen horror, Hollywood casts their IP-seeking glares to the bibliography of one man: Stephen King.

Able to capture some of the most unique macabre concepts with an epic sense of scale, King’s works have long been the basis of some of Hollywood’s most frightening big-screen outings. It’s common to leave a King adaptation feeling shaken, disturbed, yet laughing hysterically at the sheer fun of it all.

And rising auteur Osgood Perkins sought to take these visceral emotions and bring them to a modern audience with The Monkey. Based off King’s 1980 short story about two brothers who find a cursed toy monkey, the source material felt like an odd choice. Light on plot, or even original ideas, The Monkey didn’t have much to offer on paper. So Perkins went a different route, elevating things to a level of insanity so crazy that you’ve got no choice but to give in to the madness.

Let’s review:

A Sibling Blood Feud

Twin teenagers Hal and Bill (Christian Convery) find a cursed toy monkey left behind by their dad, which causes the gruesome death of anyone nearby when wound up. Timid Hal, broken from Bill’s constant bullying, winds the monkey to try and kill his brother, but instead the boys’ mother Lois (Tatiana Maslany) dies instead. The boys move to Maine with their aunt and uncle, eventually deciding to hide the monkey forever.

25 years later, an adult Hal (Theo James) struggles to maintain a relationship with his estranged son Petey (Colin O’Brien), paranoid over the monkey’s return. Bill convinces Hal to return home, having grown convinced the monkey has returned. Bringing Petey with him, Hal is shocked to find that Bill has begun to control the monkey, intending to kill Hal as revenge for Hal trying to kill him as a kid.

Petey is forced by Bill’s insane accomplice, local townie Ricky (Rohan Campbell) to retrieve the monkey for himself. But both brothers intervene, and accidentally trigger the monkey to cause the deaths of hundreds across the town. Shocked, the twins reconcile before the monkey kills Bill.

Shaken, Hal and Petey leave town, as a pale man implied to personify Death acknowledges them driving away.

Theo James Understood The Assignment

Top to bottom, everyone involved with The Monkey knew what kind of movie they were making. Director Perkins trades in his usual restraint for a much more energetic visual sense and a penchant for violence straight out of a Looney Tunes cartoon from hell. Certain sequences, such as Petey navigating Bill’s booby-trapped house, feel like a send-up to 1960s Z-movies but polished up with a blockbuster panache.

In horror, it’s easy to delve into scream queen territory, overplaying every reaction in an attempt to wring emotion out of the audience. Instead, co-stars like Tatiana Maslany and Elijah Wood (stealing the show as as annoying stepdad) opt for a quieter approach, letting their out-of-nowhere deaths shock the audience that much more.

But the clear star of the film is Theo James. Playing wonderfully against type as two polar-opposite twin brothers, James excels in pulling out the darkness in both Hal and Bill, never allowing audiences to believe for a second that either are good people. As the film grows, James beautifully anchors the film’s emotional center (as Hal) while also descending further and further into Nicolas Cage-ian madness (as Bill). It’s a double act sure to silence any critics calling James a monotone pretty boy.

Family Trauma With A Severe Side of Bloodlust

Splatter-horror is often synonymous with shlock. Naysayers call it the most talentless form of horror, relying on meaningless jumpscares with little rhyme or reason. In recent years, the indie horror scene has attempted to rehabilitate the sub-genre by using the mindless violence as an allegory for society. Perkins, ever the horror auteur, follows suit by using The Monkey’s excessive violence as the subtext for the protagonists’ hatred for each other. Many say that long-lasting hatred trauma affects an entire community, and The Monkey brilliantly showcases how Hal and Bill’s myopic hatred causes an entire town’s collapse.

Like the best King adaptations, The Monkey thrives by not deconstructing the mythos of the monkey. It’s never concretely explained how it works, if it’s connected to a devil-figure, if it’s magic, etc. It’s simply a MacGuffin that causes death. Boom, off to the races. Perkins’ previous film fell apart in the 3rd act by getting lost in the weeds in the mythos. Here, his directorial intuition has clearly grown, pulling back the curtain just enough for audiences to understand the purpose.

Let’s Jump The Shark….. Then Jump The Shark Again

And then…. we arrive at the film’s gory spectacle. Supremely over-the-top, imaginative, and magnificent in scale, The Monkey’s horror sequences transcend the film from generic horror to over-the-top camp. The film abandons all sense of pacing, development, and even worldbuilding consistency for the sake of committing some of the most insane Goldbergian horror put to film. Normally, I’d roll my eyes at such indulgence. But Perkins’ palpable glee and sheer originality allow audiences to throw their hands up and laugh at the absolute balls-to-the-wall insanity.

Very rarely has a film so unabashedly committed itself to pure camp. No restraint, no punches pulled. I found myself giggling with glee each time the monkey wound up, knowing an unforgettable tapestry of blood would soon await me.

Conclusion

In the world of streaming, it’s easy for any idea not involving a superhero to be tossed onto a streaming platform and left to rust. But, every now and then, a studio takes a gamble on a left-field idea and fully throws their weight behind it. When Neon announced The Monkey, the film fan behind me squealed with glee, as it’s become increasingly rare to see a movie like this on the big screen.

It’s not often a movie comes along that completely arrests the senses. The internet generation has grown up seeing anything and everything, so a movie like The Monkey has to really get inventive to provide a new experience without delving into pure shock-cinema. Luckily, the film rises to the occasion.

Like a Saturday Morning cartoon drenched in blood, The Monkey throws everything it can at its audiences, inviting them to join in on the meta-appreciation of cinema’s finest VFX artists having the time of their life. It’s not high art, it’s not necessary to the story, but it’s impeccably crafted and a rollicking good time.

The Monkey was released on February 21, 2025!