THE STORY – When twin brothers Bill and Hal find their father’s old monkey toy in the attic, a series of deaths start. The siblings decide to throw the toy away and move on with their lives, growing apart over the years.
THE CAST – Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Elijah Wood, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell & Sarah Levy
THE TEAM – Osgood Perkins (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 98 Minutes
Twin brothers Bill and Hal (Christian Convery) haven’t always had the best relationship. Older brother Bill, who ate the majority of their mother’s placenta in the womb, bullied Hal relentlessly when they were kids and set him up to be bullied at school. Then, their pilot father flew off, leaving their mother (Tatiana Maslany) to care for them alone. When going through their father’s belongings, the boys find a wind-up, organ-grinder-style monkey that reveals a toothy grin and plays the drum after you wind the key. But, thanks to a series of accidents, including the deaths of their mother and the uncle who subsequently took them in, they believe that the monkey doesn’t just play the drums but causes the brutal, swift deaths of people in their orbit. Hal attempts to destroy the monkey, but it returns, so they wrap it in chains and throw it down a well, hoping it will never kill again. Fast forward to the present day, when their aunt Ida (Sarah Levy) dies under mysterious circumstances, leading the reclusive Bill to send Hal (both now played by Theo James) on a mission to ensure the monkey hasn’t resurfaced.
Osgood Perkins’s “The Monkey” sees the writer-director tapping into one of his greatest strengths as an actor: His off-kilter sense of humor (highlighted here in his cameo as the boys’ uncle, Will). Perkins’s previous films could all be described as aesthetically precise works of atmospheric horror, which could also describe “The Monkey.” However, whereas his previous films included humor only to break the tension or further unsettle the audience, he leans into it much more here. “The Monkey” is a deadpan horror comedy that earns every laugh it gets with precise comic timing and perfect joke structure. The self-seriousness that plagues films like “Gretel & Hansel” is part of the joke here, as the deadpan delivery reveals just how ridiculous everything is.
The Devil is just as real in this world as he is in the world of “Longlegs” or “The Blackcoat’s Daughter,” but when the subject of your film is a wind-up monkey that causes wildly improbable deaths that often involve mechanisms straight out of a Rube Goldberg machine, you have to embrace the absurdity, which Perkins does with childlike glee. The gore-filled kills impress with their creativity, but what makes them memorable is their rhythm, which Perkins and editors Graham Fortin and Greg Ng have calibrated to get the maximum possible audience response. Every single one lands with an exclamation point, eliciting screams and laughter in equal measure.
Perkins’s masterfully tight control over the film’s tone extends to the cast, who also contribute to the film’s pacing with brilliant comic timing. Maslany is a hoot as the boys’ mother, speaking to her kids about death and their father’s philandering ways as if they were her age. Convery does fantastic work tapping into how grief can make you curl inward or lash outward as the young versions of Bill and Hal, and even though James looks nothing like him, he creates believable older versions of both boys. He proves himself a master of deadpan comedy, making his nearly affectless voice the film’s most invaluable asset. He’s magnetic onscreen, which makes up for him having to spend a lot of screen time opposite Colin O’Brien as Hal’s son Petey, who sadly lacks the charisma of his co-stars and is saddled with playing the film’s least interesting character.
Petey is key to the film’s central theme of generational trauma, but only since it impacts Hal, making the kid a more schematic character than Hal and Bill. Hal has clearly never gotten over his father’s betrayal and has now distanced himself from Petey, seemingly out of fear of bringing similar harm to him, whether psychologically through his own actions or physically through the monkey. The titular monkey becomes a massive metaphor for familial trauma and how it can haunt you – a welcome expansion on Stephen King’s short story, but Perkins’s screenplay handles it a little clunkily, bluntly stating the thematic intent in a heavy-handed closing monologue, which James handles as deftly as he can. It works, but it’s unnecessary, given how well Perkins has put the message across without stating it outright in the rest of the film.
Still, this over-explanation of the film’s themes doesn’t ruin what is otherwise an incredibly entertaining ride. Right from the opening scene, it’s clear that this film’s tongue is firmly stuck in its cheek, and it’s all the more enjoyable for that. The first kill sets itself up like a typical horror movie kill, but then the kicker comes, and it’s full of such slick, sick panache that you can only laugh and applaud. Osgood Perkins has long since proven that he has tremendous skill behind the camera – you can’t make a film as oppressively full of dread as “Longlegs” without it – so it’s heartening to see him use that skill to make something that audiences can have fun with as well as be scared by.
With “The Monkey,” Perkins has gone the extra mile to make the audience laugh, and the result is a film that, despite being just as dark and unrelenting as his previous films, is far more entertaining to watch. It’s his best film yet and, hopefully, a sign of things to come from this talented storyteller.
