THE MONKEY - Mark Reviews Movies

The Monkey, Neon

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 20, 2025

The filmmaking of Osgood Perkins might seem too formally precise for him to make a comedy, but here's The Monkey, which is genuinely funny in a demented, morbid, and horrific sort of way. It's an expansion/riff on a Stephen King short story, which wasn't going for laughs, but Perkins has found them anyway.

In retrospect, playing this material as comedy makes almost too much sense. For those who don't know the source material, it involves a toy monkey—the kind that would bang a pair of cymbals when wound up with a key in its back. Every time it would clang those percussion instruments, someone or something would die—or, at least, that's what the protagonist believed.

It's not meant to be funny, of course, but if one takes the premise seriously and draws it out to some more considerable length, it would probably seem pretty silly. Perkins realizes that and simply transforms the whole thing into a farce about fate, fathers, and, most importantly, flesh being pierced, ripped, burned, demolished, exploded, and otherwise destroyed. The deaths here and so gory and so over-the-top that one doesn't know whether to be disgusted or to laugh. Perkins' philosophy seems to be that both should be the appropriate reaction.

The story begins with a prologue that will probably sound like the setup to a joke. A commercial airline pilot (played by a barely recognizable Adam Scott) walks into a pawn shop with a toy monkey. He's desperate to get rid of the thing, although the store owner doesn't seem particularly interested in the toy or too worried about the fact that the pilot is covered in blood (It's not his, the pilot insists, as if that makes it better).

Those who know what's in store from the King tale might notice a slew of very sharp objects in the shop, and that's part of the warped game Perkins plays here. When you know a violent death is inevitable, everything in the background starts to look like an instrument of doom.

Perkins, though, trains his camera on a rat, gnawing away at a string tied to something we can't quite figure, and while the resulting effect isn't quite as elaborate as a Rube Goldberg device, it definitely has that quality. Indeed, the climax features a clearer example of that kind of absurd machine, and its deadly payload just sits there for several beats, until we might have forgotten that the filmmaker has already set up the final payoff.

The horror of each of these deaths is in the sudden, grisly shock of them. The humor is in realizing every clever step of foreshadowing and misdirection that Perkins has taken to achieve that feeling of surprise. We might know what's coming, but that doesn't mean we can predict exactly or even broadly how it arrives.

The toy monkey, which bangs a drum and has accompanying organ music built inside it in this adaptation, ends up the inheritance of the pilot's twin sons. He abandoned his family, almost certainly to escape the death-bringing toy, but the boys' mother Lois (Tatiana Maslany) knows little and cares even less about that. While digging through their absent father's old things, twins Hal and Bill (both played, as children, by Christian Convery) find the monkey.

The brothers don't like each other much, and after testing the toy or trying to intentionally use it against someone, people close to them die in bloody ways. After realizing there's no controlling or destroying the damned object, they chain it up in its packaging and toss the box down a deep well.

The bulk of the story, however, takes place 25 years later, and if Perkins' screenplay gets a twisted kick out of inventing assorted convoluted and grotesque demises, it also extends that feeling of things being entirely off-kilter to the characters. For example, the adult Hal, played by Theo James, is a seemingly straitlaced and boring guy, who lives alone and keeps anyone who could be close to him at a distance, but James plays his guilt, fear, and pent-up emotions so severely that he's almost a walking, talking punch line.

After all, he has ruined his only romantic relationship, which resulted in a son whom he only sees for one week each year, because of his dread about a toy monkey. It's ridiculous, and Perkins and James almost seem determined to deflate the supposed tragedy of this character with some amusing supporting players (including Elijah Wood as a self-proclaimed expert on fatherhood who wants to adopt Hal's son), Hal's contentious relationship with his teenager son Petey (Colin O'Brien) on what becomes a road trip to find the monkey, and, of course, the many, many deaths that come to pass—often right in front of Hal.

Such details are important to note—not only because it means being able to talk around the specifics of the gruesome deaths, which would be easy to label as cartoonish if not for just how gory they can be, but also because it gets at better reason, beyond the bloodily funny carnage on display, why the film succeeds. The tone here is wholly consistent and consistently outlandish. It might be difficult to find humor in material that's primarily about the various ways a human life can expire without warning, but Perkins' screwball approach to everything here doesn't just allow us to laugh. It practically demands that response.

The Monkey isn't going for anything deeper than that, and indeed, it pretty much turns any attempt to find something deeper within the material into a joke. Maybe there's something cathartic about laughing in the face of fictional death, but it could just be that, as surprising as it might be seem, Perkins is good at telling a joke.

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