The Monkey

dir: Osgood Perkins

2025

The Monkey is probably one of the best Stephen King adaptations ever. At least, “best of” for this year. There have been so many, probably more than Dickens, adaptations of his work, that probably even he can’t keep track of them all.

But this feels like a perfect melding of King’s gruesome ideas and this director’s various obsessions, into a flick that is often hard to watch in just how gory it gets, but manages to be relentlessly entertaining throughout.

And it’s funny. It’s the darkest humour you can imagine, but damn if it didn’t have me chortling like a foolish thing.

The monkey in question is styled like the stereotypical organ grinder’s monkey (an image / ‘meme’ from a million years ago) with the vest and such, but with drumsticks and drums instead of cymbals. Disney apparently own the copyright on the monkey with the cymbals somehow, due to the Pixar Toy Story movies, because of course they do.

It is large. Its eyes are huge, and terrifying on their own. But the monkey’s grin, those teeth, well it’s the stuff of nightmares. It is not alive but it’s also not dead. If you dismember it, it somehow gets put back together. If you burn it, it reappears, somehow. You can’t give it away, but you also can’t live it. You think you successfully buried it somewhere, and then it’s back in your cupboard behind the Hungry Hungry Hippos and the Connect 4.

It’s especially gratifying for me because, unlike a lot of strange, possibly funny-smelling people, I did not care at all for this director’s previous outing, which was called Longlegs, and I absolutely adore an older film of his called I am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House. I’m not saying this is his best film, but this feels certainly like the time where all the elements have come together to deliver a coherent, nasty delight.

There are various themes here, including an obsession with parental abandonment, especially fathers abandoning their sons, or fathers being desperately afraid that they’ll visit some unspeakable horror upon their own kids, and our collective terror as a species in the face of Death, which can apparently come at any time out of the chaos that is our existence.

And then there’s the cursed monkey. You wind up the key in its back, and something horribly fatal happens to someone known to you or near you. You can’t order it to kill particular people; the only seeming guarantee is that the person turning the key doesn’t buy the big one, ironically or otherwise, not yet at least.

You would think the murderous monkey would be the nastiest piece of work in such a film, oh, but it’s not. If Hal (Christian Convery as a child, Theo James as an adult) only had the monkey to deal with, maybe his life could’ve turned out okay. But Hal has a twin brother who hates him, called Bill (Christian Convery as a child, Theo James as an adult), and he gets all wound up even without a key in his back.

Though identical, they have very different personalities. Hal is fearful and timid, and picked on, whereas Bill is a bit of a fucking idiot and a bully, and torments his brother whenever the mood strikes.

Their father, who we only saw in the brief intro, is not in the picture, but at least they have their mom for a few minutes. Things were said, words were spoken, feelings were hurt, and then the children are alone. Their mother (the great Tatiana Maslany) tried to instil in them a cavalier attitude to the hardships of life, and to the fact that Death cannot be bought off or reasoned with, and as such we can’t live our lives trembling in the shadow of the knowledge that it could strike at any random moment. And so we dance, a dance macabre, to ignore the inevitable at least for a while with a hot step and a laugh.

Their helpful uncle steps in (hilariously played by Osgood Perkins himself, with some mightily impressive L shaped sideburns) but this being the film it is, he’s not there for very long.

Guilt about his mother’s death, fear about… the monkey killing more people, or by default Hal being responsible for more people’s deaths, has led to him being a fairly withdrawn person in adult life, though somehow he managed to have sex with a human female and is the proud (deeply ashamed) father of a teenager called Petey (Colin O’Brian). He cares about his son, or so he claims, but he avoids him out of fear that the curse / monkey will come back and kill him in a convoluted and hilarious way.

There are so many reasons for fathers to be distant from their kids, in this, the so-called “real” world, where cursed monkeys don’t comically cut down people in the prime of their lives. Laziness, lack of consideration, shame, misdirected animus about the other parent, anger, addiction, disappointment, selfishness; it’s a DSM-V smorgasbord of possibilities. We never find out how Hal managed to have at least a temporary relationship with a compliant human female, but we guess it fell apart because of his general terror in the face of life itself.

I don’t know what parenthood is like for people who aren’t riddled with anxiety (and perhaps a few STDs), but for those of us who are not characters in a macabre horror flick immediately feel terror when confronted with the fragility of our own or other people’s babies. From the first time you see them, the first moment. Even with the best of intentions we can reduce ourselves to quivering wrecks contemplating all the bad things that could happen or that we could accidentally do that would harm these fragile, goofy beings. Then they grow and become less fragile, but that terror remains, even 18 years later.

I think, even within the context of such a grotesquely monstrous movie, we’re meant to sympathise with Hal’s concerns, and not to think too little of him for having deliberately kept himself away from a son he actually loves. The theme of parental abandonment is sort of balanced with the idea that those people who became shitty parents who abandoned their families, their kids, did so because they were genuinely afraid they were going to cause harm to their kids. That their kids were still harmed, and not by a cursed monkey, is not lost on us.

So, in a flick about twins, well, if Hal is anxious and guilt-ridden, there’s the other side, being his darker, shittier self as exemplified by Bill, who is deranged in all the ways that Hal is not. Bill is… kinda demented, and has a plan for revenge which involves punishing his brother and his nephew, but that’s the thing about plans in a random universe where chaos reigns supreme – hilarious deaths will ensue. So many deaths…

If Hal represents a case of arrested development emotionally due to childhood trauma, Bill makes it all even more literal, by continuing to wear a mangled version of the child suit he wore to his mother’s funeral, initially out of a misguided belief that it would stop future deaths. And then there is the berserk mullet they have Theo James wear, my gods, it’s frightening, and tells us in no uncertain terms that Bill is not right in the head.

The ending… well, this flick, like the Final Destination movies, is about the deaths. The more elaborate, the more surprising, the more convoluted the better. The end of this flick really feels like the whole production went “fuck it, let’s kill almost everyone in the wackiest manners possible”. And it probably delivers.

I have to call this flick a horror flick, even though it’s not scary at all, well at least not to me, but to call it anything else would potentially do people a great disservice. To call it just a comedy would obscure the fact that appalling things happen to human bodies in this flick, and fingers end up in people’s mouths, and not for any good reasons. I’m not going to list or mention any of them, because mostly they’re so shocking, and deserve to be shocking, and unspoiled.

And yet somehow they manage to wrap the flick up with a heartfelt message about fathers and sons finding a way to reconcile themselves with their shared (or separate) pasts, in order to not let their problems prevent them from having a meaningful relationship in the future.

Theo James, an actor I’ve generally struggled to appreciate in other tv shows (like Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen, which I hated but not because of Theo James) or movies, is pretty great here. He also delivers a lot of voiceover, but he has a pretty good voice for voiceover as well, even if he’s putting on a generic American accent. He somehow manages to convey the believable aspects of the character of Hal (an ambivalently-alive person worried about hurting his kid but also worried about losing his kid through alienation), and the less believable (someone who has experienced so much trauma that watching people explode in front of him barely causes an eyebrow to raise), in order to form an almost complete character.

I enjoyed the fuck out of this flick. I think Osgood Perkins nailed this one, knocked it screaming out of the park. And then, to extend the metaphor, it probably whacked someone in the head and sent them into a woodchipper.

8 times and yet Longlegs is the one people still talk about out of 10

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“I want you to know we’re going to do our very best, it’s just that our very best might be pretty bad” – oh yeah, just like with most parents - The Monkey