‘The Monkey’ movie review: Osgood Perkins’ gorefest bludgeons a stale beat to death

A still from ‘The Monkey’
| Photo Credit: Neon

Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey is a characteristically deranged swing at horror-comedy. It’s loosely based on Stephen King’s 1980 short story, but where King’s original felt like a meditation on guilt and inherited doom, Perkins’ adaptation cranks the camp to eleven. In many ways, The Monkey feels like the perfect soft reboot for the Final Destination franchise. Heck, it wouldn’t be out of place in a James Wan Conjuring-verse crossover event, either. Some will revel in its cartoonishly elaborate death sequences; others will find its smirking self-awareness exhausting. Either way, the infernal cretin is impossible to ignore.

From its opening sequence, the film makes its go-for-broke intentions clear. The familiar face of a blood-soaked Lumon employee stumbles into a pawn shop to the opening notes of Asha Bhonsle’s “Do Lafzon Ki Hai”, desperately trying to offload a sinister-looking drummer monkey toy. The shopkeeper, naturally, doesn’t take the warning seriously, and within moments, a chain reaction leaves him wonderfully eviscerated. Perkins revels in the excess, setting the tone for his film that treats these inane deaths like grotesque punchlines.

We jump to 1999, where twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelborn (played as kids by Christian Convery) stumble upon their father’s old belongings, including — you guessed it — the monkey. Their airline pilot father (Adam Scott, in his brief but memorable turn), “made like eggs and scrambled”, and it’s not long before the brothers realise that every time the monkey bangs its drum, someone nearby meets an untimely demise. Bill takes a perverse pleasure in his brother’s growing paranoia, while their oblivious mother (Tatiana Maslany) remains unassumingly preoccupied, until she too meets a grisly end.

Fast-forward 25 years, and the now-adult Hal (Theo James) has gone full horror protagonist-in-exile. He’s estranged from his brother, haunted by his childhood, and doing his best to keep his son (Colin O’Brien) at arm’s length for fear that the monkey’s curse will resurface. Of course, fate (or Perkins) has other plans, and soon the bodies are piling up once more. The deaths are treated with a cartoonish absurdity — a Benihana chef’s precision knife fillets the head off a customer, a motel pool transforming into an electrified deathtrap, an uncle trampled to strawberry jam by a stampede of wild horses. The violence isn’t scary or disturbing, so much as operatic, with each elaborate set piece escalating in ridiculousness until the deaths become numbing.

This is where The Monkey runs into trouble. For all the ways horror-comedy has been a tough nut to crack, Perkins at least deserves credit for trying. His take on King’s short swings for the genre’s elusive sweet spot where creeping dread and a sharp sense of irreverence embrace. And for a brief moment it almost works. The film flirts with the potential of being something fresh: a stylish, mean-spirited, and absurdist take on childhood trauma. But, like so many horror-comedies before it, The Monkey is yet another cautionary tale about why this genre hybrid rarely lands. It’s too timid to be genuinely scary, too self-serious to be truly funny, and too convoluted by its own atmosphere to ever feel fully alive.

Theo James in a still from ‘The Monkey’
| Photo Credit:
Neon

James does his best to inject the film with some gravitas, but it’s an uphill battle when the story is more invested in its next elaborate demise than in any meaningful character development.

To his credit, Perkins commits fully to the bit. The film’s aesthetic leans into a garish, late-’90s pastiche, and there’s a certain offhand charm in its commitment to treating death as both inevitable and ludicrous. This is all the more disappointing given how The Monkey arrived in theaters riding a wave of meticulously crafted marketing courtesy of Neon. While Longlegs thrived on its unsettling slow-burn, The Monkey wears out its welcome by hammering home the same ‘death is absurd, people suck’ joke, without much variation.

For all its pulpy simplicity, King’s original had a sense of gnawing doom. Perkins, by contrast, wants The Monkey to be a horror film for people who roll their eyes at horror films. The real terror is in the dawning realisation that Neon has once again orchestrated a masterclass in misdirection, whipping up a frenzy for a film that is little more than a cheap parlor trick when the blood and guts clear.

The Monkey is currently running in theatres