Directed By Osgood Perkins

Starring – Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Christian Convery

The Plot – When twin brothers Bill and Hal (James) find their father’s old monkey toy in the attic, a series of gruesome deaths start. The siblings decide to throw the toy away and move on with their lives, growing apart over the years.

Rated R for strong bloody violent content, gore, adult language throughout and some sexual references.

THE MONKEY – Official Redband Trailer – In Theaters February 21

POSITIVES

For every moviegoer unabashedly smitten with “The Monkey”, there will be someone who equally detests it, and this is because of Perkins’ commitment to campy slashers of the 80’s and 90’s that I don’t think many will expect with a movie advertised as sternly and serious as it was. Why I fall in the former category is for Perkins’ unflinching persistence at imbedding the kind of humor to the engagement that begs to be watched in an environment with many friends and many drinks, juggling these gruesomely horrendous visual deaths with meanspirited irony that you can’t help but laugh at, all the while never sacrificing the tense or compelling elements to his titular antagonist that still brings a foreboding cloud of ominous doom that hangs directly overhead, each time this chimp drummer moves back into focus of any character unfortunate enough to be standing in front of it. A weaker director could certainly attain either horror or humor, but Perkins masters both simultaneously through a first half that has as much sharpness in wit as it does punctuation in protruding permanence, making it all the easier to remain faithfully invested, despite surface level storytelling that eventually starts to get the better of it, the longer the film persists. Because the gags are so downright abrupt with the worst kind of “Final Destination” ridiculousness in execution to go alongside some impeccable editing and framing that pauses long enough to allow audience engagement, the deaths feel so devilishly crude and heavily self-indulgent, with a fine combination of practical and computer-generated effects that cooks the carnage candy to four-hundred degrees. From a realistic perspective in anatomy, the film isn’t exactly interested, but in exploring the darkest and depraved depths of human fantasy, Perkins makes the deaths feel fun and ferocious, and despite the over-predictability factor of the fate of the movie’s underdeveloped supporting characters feeling evident, it doesn’t make it any less satisfying in building tension, whenever the monkey starts to bang his drum, where the uncertainty factor of who will be affected always kept my curiosity ratcheted to eleven. Beyond Perkins impeccable influence towards making this feel so unlike any other Stephen King adaptation, the double dipping performance from Theo James definitely represents my favorite work to date from the actor, particularly in conveying the versatility both emotionally and morally between these two brothers that allows us to see them as different entities, despite being played by the same actor. Part of this attainability comes from the production doing such a bang-up job in altering their appearances as prominently as possible, but James’ manically exaggerated side of Bill makes his introverted sedation as Hal all the more distinguishing, and while the brothers spend the entirety of the film at odds with one another, the ensuing loneliness effortlessly articulated by James’ dual depiction articulates two sides to overcoming grief that ties them together in ways that the characters can’t even begin to understand, specifically in the motivation that each of them bring to finding the monkey that has since alluded them for twenty-five years. The film also has strongly stirring cameos in everybody from Tatiana Maslany, Adam Scott, and Elijah Wood, who despite their limited screen time each capture a presence and approach to deliveries that seamlessly mirror those aforementioned campy undertakings of Perkins’ direction. Maslany channels a glooming and self-wallowing side to her grief that I haven’t experienced from the actress until now, and with so many overwhelming developments firing at her with unforgiving velocity, Maslany bares the soul of an emotionally exhausted woman whose caustically unapologetic honesty to the interactions with her children attains some of my biggest laughs of the entire film. Lastly, while I had more than a few problems with the script, I commend it for mostly keeping this air of ambiguity with this monkey that not only leaves the door open for future sequels, but also in not wasting ample screen time to heavy-handedly detail every supernatural instance to its capabilities. As the film persists, I picked up on certain measures with the rules that weren’t attained from some of the obvious and on-the-nose exposition that started to stack, and with just enough breadcrumbs it left enough room for audience interpretation in ways that drive curiosity, while also evading the formulaic nature of so many horror movies completely eviscerating the mystique of their character designs with unattainable answers that are often found at a library computer screen or with a wise character who somehow knows generations of incidents.

NEGATIVES

As to where “The Monkey” stands on the positive side of Stephen King adaptations, especially in recent years, it definitely isn’t without issues, particularly in the third act of the movie, where its momentum for humor and horror started to wither into imbalanced territory. This is where the short story origins of this movie start to feel evident, as a complete lack of development with the characters and deviation in the structure of the storytelling makes the material feel like it’s taking on elastic circumstances, especially once the humor is no longer as consistently effective as the horror. In a sense, this does bring us the movie that many of us were expecting from misleading trailers, but at a cost of repetition essentially conveying the movie as a series of set-ups and pay-offs, with nothing in the way of expansion, and while that will certainly be enough for some audiences, the script’s metaphorical undertaking in everything from the four horseman at the apocalypse, to what the monkey represents, makes me feel like Perkins errored too much on the side of caution, with very little deviation from the original story that inspired him. Speaking of those metaphorical instances, the movie’s dialogue is at times embarrassing for how forcefully it lingers and meanders intentions for the audience, which never feel natural for the characters they’re spouted from. One could certainly attribute this to Perkins’ desire to never take his direction or the film too seriously, but when it comes to the monkey’s purpose being quite literally spelled-out on a box by two summarized words, it tells me that Perkins didn’t have a lot of faith in his audience to piece something so obvious together, and as a result it left me feeling like I was continuously a step ahead of the movie, in ways that never benefited me. Finally, I found most of the compositions for the movie’s underscoring from the great Edo Van Breemen to be underwhelming, especially with this being his first feature length score since the 2022 documentary “Unarchived”. Part of what I’ve always appreciated about Edo’s work is the emotional layers that he adds to documentaries that allow them to tap into the climactic highs of a fictional feature length narrative, so getting the chance to audibly interpret his work for an actual fictional narrative was something that I was looking forward to, and while I don’t think it’s necessarily his fault, I think that this movie doesn’t utilize music half as effectively or atmospherically as Perkins’ previous films “LongLegs” or “Hansel and Gretel”. This is again another example of a movie opting for soundtrack over score, with a Motown blues mix of tracks dominating the spectrum, and though the film is glutton for humor and atmospherically airy resonation, it doesn’t imbed any kind of equal accommodation to the horror side of the hybrid, where these familiar tracks don’t do anything other than present these death sequences with an essence of cutesy and quirky that overstayed their welcome quite quickly, wasting not only one of Perkins’ greatest feats of strength as a refreshingly impulsive director, but also Van Breemen’s long-awaited homecoming, for anyone who is a fan of his work.

OVERALL
“The Monkey” bangs to the beat of its own drum by infusing unforeseen campy humor to Osgood Perkins’ brand of skin-stretching brutality, and the result is a totally apeshit film that feels twice as divisive as his predecessor, even with highly satisfying carnage candy that never disappoints. Though the film is a good time for demented audiences, its inability to thematically dive deeper has its crossover appeal feeling every bit as limited as the film’s grasp on the material, with a weak link of a third act that should feel catastrophic but instead comes across as rushed and underdeveloped to an outlined bigger picture.

My Grade: 7.1 or B-