The Monkey ★★

Released: Friday 21st February 2025

Directed: Osgood Perkins

Cast: Christian Convery, Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Colin O’Brien

Another day, another adaptation of a Stephen King story. It’s understandable, considering King’s status as one of the leading horror writers for the last several decades, but that doesn’t always translate into success on screen. The Monkey, based on a short story from 1980, is one of those failures, showcasing more imagination than weak interpretations such as the most recent Salem’s Lot but little else. After the success of Osgood Perkins’ fourth and arguably his breakout film, Longlegs, expectations were high. Unfortunately, The Monkey might be Perkins’ poorest film yet.

The Monkey starts as it means to go on, with a deeply unserious tone, comical script, and exaggerated deaths. In 1999, Petey Shelburn tries to return a drum-playing monkey (it is not a toy) to an antiques store. If you turn the key on the back of the statuette, the unnerving primate will bear its teeth in a frightful grin and strike its drum several times, thus causing someone, somewhere, to die. In this case, it is the poor shop owner, with Perkins finding potential death in every nook and cranny of the building, reminiscent of Final Destination. Petey tries to burn the monkey but fails. Years later, Petey has left home, leaving behind his wife, Lois (Tatiana Maslany), and twin sons, Hal and Bill (Christian Convery).

Upon discovering the evil fuzzball in their father’s old things, death starts to follow Hal and Bill, right into their adult years where Theo James plays the twins. Throughout The Monkey, Perkins attempts to make grand gestures about the mortality of humans and how death is literally everywhere, but these statements feel at odds with the comedic, infantile expirations we see on screen. The deaths are fun and inventive, if not memorable, but they seem at loggerheads with these attempted serious moments. It’s never clear what Perkins is going for exactly; The Monkey is rarely funny, never scary, nor seriously melancholic. Longlegs was the perfect balancing act of over-the-top Nic Cage mayhem with genuine scares; The Monkey is not.

James does his best with a weak script, and he does well to flit between the meek Hal and the nasty Bill. He is no Nicolas Cage, but then again, who is? One other positive is Maslany, who gives us sadness, comedy, and genuine freakiness in her relatively brief screen time. Based on this performance, the fact she will star in Perkins’ other feature releasing this year, Keeper, is deeply exciting. An odd cameo by Elijah Wood is also a welcome surprise. Ultimately, all the other characters in The Monkey are simply vehicles for extravagant demises, which are suitably gory and imaginative. The Monkey generally feels like a montage of deaths, with filler in between each one to stretch it out to feature film length.

Like any filmmaker, Perkins is allowed a misstep. His track record is strong: his debut feature, The Blackcoat’s Daughter, is a fascinating, terrifying feature, and the mood of I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House was sublime, even if the story was lacking. The Monkey is most notable for how it lacks any of the precise atmosphere of these previous films. Some of its stylistic wackiness lands and is undeniably Perkins, but for the most part, The Monkey could have been made by any generic director.