The Monkey Review

Director Osgood Perkins is following his eerie serial killer flick Longlegs from last year by focusing on a different type of murderer: a wind-up toy monkey with a drum. Okay, maybe it’s not exactly a toy, as the script makes a point of stressing throughout. An adaptation of Stephen King’s short story from 1980, the classic cymbal imagery is adjusted for an ape with a vicious smile and piercing evil eyes.

The film starts with a somewhat surprising cameo by Adam Scott (Severance) attempting to pawn off the item, only for it to backfire with the gruesome death of the store clerk. This seemed to set the tone for the level of gore, but the deaths after this feel almost cheesy at points. We soon find out that Scott’s character was the father of two twin boys and ran as fast as he could after witnessing the monkey’s powers. Hal and Bill are raised by their mother (Tatiana Maslany), who provides a blunt but guiding light for them after a wake. However, her light soon dims after Hal winds the monkey with the hopes of Bill dying — only for it to backfire. As Maslany’s character Lois pointed out before her demise: death comes for all of us eventually, even if it’s brutal.

The Monkey follows through with this message by leaning on the nostalgic horror tropes quite often. There’s the attractive woman who meets an untimely fate as a bikini-clad hotel guest explodes from an electrocuted pool. The twins’ cool babysitter has things go wrong when she takes the twins to Hibachi. That said, Perkins’ modern-era mockery is still woven in, including the group of young women from a true crime group cheering outside of a murder scene.

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Theo James (The White Lotus) tackles the adult versions of the twins. Hal, the lead, has distanced himself from his son in fear of the monkey’s return. The more outspoken brother, Bill, has made it his life’s mission to find the monkey and seek vengeance. While it attempts to showcase how the brothers approached grief differently, it does get a bit too supervillainy at the end, as Bill lives in an abandoned warehouse as his lair.

Aspects of the costume and set design also were hard to pin down. 1999 feels like the ‘70s. 2024 feels like the ‘90s. The plot feels equally disjointed and predictable. It does its best to provide a commentary on grief and death without fully hitting viewers over the head with the message. Yet, the film gets bogged down by other elements, whether it’s becoming too repetitive when approaching Hal’s relationship with his son Petey (Colin O’Brien) or introducing unnecessary side characters.

Knowing what Perkins is capable of from Longlegs, it’s easy to feel disappointed by the material. That said, The Monkey is still an entertaining film to kick off 2025 by catching it in theaters — even if you’re terrified of animal-tronics.