Cinema from the Spectrum

In The Monkey, Osgood Perkins’s adaptation of Stephen King’s short story of the same name, the harbinger of doom that our heroes are going up against is nothing more than just a toy monkey. Osgood Perkins knows just how silly this would sound and I think that’s willing to have a whole lot more fun with the idea that death at the hands of a toy can be so funny. But as one would know from having seen so much death up close, there’s a certain point where it can all still seem so terrifying. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise given where Perkins gets his lineage within the horror genre, though for better or worse, you get the sense that this is definitely someone’s first foray into blending both horror and comedy into the same setting.

The morbid origins of The Monkey are evident enough from the moment where it starts: this is a story about a pair of twin brothers, Hal and Bill Shelburn, who discover a wind-up toy monkey that was left behind by their father (Adam Scott, in a hilarious cameo). After winding the key on the monkey’s back, the monkey plays a little rhythm on the drum, but the moment it finishes, someone close to them is killed. At a certain point, it has happened for one brother so much that he refuses to get out of a suit that has been prepared for him for funerals – knowing that they come by so frequently. But twenty-five years later, Hal (Theo James) has now found himself estranged from his brother until a moment comes where the monkey’s killing spree continues.

From the moment when The Monkey starts, you’re already being treated to something ridiculously silly. But it’s a moment that really sets the tone for what you should be expecting Osgood Perkins to be treating you for a little over an hour and a half. A toy monkey apparently capable of pulling off some incredibly elaborate deaths in the same manner as the Final Destination films, and the over-the-top nature of the kills, together with the overdone gore, makes for some of the funniest that any horror movie could get in a while. Unfortunately that might also be where the greatest curse to hit The Monkey comes about.

When you see the first few Rube-Goldberg style kills, they’re very funny. Then the same joke keeps getting played over and over again, and they’re less shocking than the last. Granted, I don’t think that Osgood Perkins is taking any of this as seriously because of the very goofy nature of this premise, but I think that a film with so many elaborate killing scenarios should at least try to make up for that by feeling more inventive in turn. When many of the scenarios all result in the same gore gags coming forth, it only ends up falling flat – save for one very unexpected and funny death that comes by near the film’s ending.

Nonetheless, I think that it’s evident that Osgood Perkins has gotten the vibe of Stephen King right: all the way going down to how he’s materialized childhood trauma. But even these traits of Stephen King’s writing, as familiar as they might be to many of his readers can still be morbidly funny at times, considering the overtly sadistic nature of the childhood bullies that Hal puts up with through the entire first half of the film that focuses on the Shelburn twins when they were children. Even then, I can’t help but feel as if Osgood Perkins wrote these children to be such horrible monsters as a result of his own upbringing with the fact his father’s legacy is forever tied to the horror genre. It’s also part of what makes Theo James’s cartoonish performance so thoroughly entertaining from beginning to end.

But I think that silliness can only go so far in here. Osgood Perkins clearly seems to have a whole lot of love for the horror genre owing to where his family lineage comes from. Yet I think that he doesn’t quite do nearly enough with the silliest moments on display in The Monkey in order to fully deliver. All the most bizarre circumstances that you’ll be seeing in here at least seem to point back to how death has become so commonplace one’s growth and how it psychologically messes with the brain, but this just might be where you can sense Osgood Perkins is struggling to nail the tonal balance. One minute it’s funny, but it ultimately feels too conceited to truly land.

Watch the trailer right here.

All images via Neon.

Directed by Osgood Perkins
Screenplay by Osgood Perkins, based on the short story by Stephen King
Produced by Dave Caplan, Michael Clear, Chris Ferguson, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, James Wan
Starring Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Elijah Wood, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell, Sarah Levy, Adam Scott
Premiere Date: February 21, 2025
Running Time: 98 minutes