The Monkey (2025)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Mike Flanagan is in the news again for making more Stephen King film adaptations but it's Oz Perkins who helmed The Monkey. Based on King's 1980 short story of the same name, the plot concerns a cursed toy monkey that causes somewhat random brutal deaths. That's it. Simple, straightforward, easy. No demonic entity or possessive spirit of a serial killer, no flawed AI taking over, no expansive mythmaking or origin lore. Just death, meted out by the kind of nightmarish plaything that is sure to make you ask, "Who would actually play with this, and how?"

Perkins, who came into the spotlight last year for Longlegs, is much more impressive a filmmaker when social media conversation isn't hyperbolically lauding his as "the scariest movie of the year" and such drivel. I'll maintain that The Blackcoat's Daughter is much more terrifying than anything Nic Cage eked out from his mime makeup, fun as that was to see. His Gretel & Hansel and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House are masterclasses in Gothic atmosphere and detached storytelling. But the serial killer weirdness in Longlegs implied a turn in Perkins's aesthetic, and The Monkey certainly leans into a gonzo style we haven't seen from him yet. In his case, bigger spectacle isn't camp, which has been growing in popularity (though often misunderstood and mislabeled); it's just horror, a frank look at the absolute mess death often brings with it.

That's not to say it's a morose affair. This macabre experiment in tone indeed features several moments designed to elicit aloud cries of joy and surprise. Think Final Destination, but without the obsession those characters have with outsmarting or escaping death; those feature a certain hope and agency that Perkins's film pointedly does not share. The Monkey will "getcha," and it's going to be gross and strange, and there really isn't rhyme or reason to it. Its opening sequence demonstrates this, as a messy (read: bloody) Adam Scott (Krampus, Little Evil) barges into a pawn shop to sell the ape doll and its little drum, looking as grim and horrified as... well, as someone who usually does comedy would in bloody clothes at night while lugging around a cursed toy that could cause his death at any moment. Perkins has been a confident filmmaker from his start, but a film this popularly oriented could have slipped from his grip; not so, and it's in scenes like this that he reminds us of his absolute control over complex and heightened tone.

Time jumps ahead, and the story proper concerns twin brothers, Hal and Bill, who discover dad's toy monkey (despite our having seen him destroy it) and activate it. It was in a closet with his remaining stuff, dear old daddy having absconded mysteriously after that prologue scene. First it's their babysitter who bites it -- almost literally -- and then the boys realize every time they twist the monkey's wind-up key, someone near them dies. By the time it takes their weary mother (Tatiana Maslany) from them, the boys drop it down a well and soon become estranged. We jump again twenty-five years into the future, and, as any King fan will tell you, the twins' hidden past returns with a vengeance.

The barrage of death scenes in this film are graphic, to be sure, but they aren't really meant to be taken seriously. It's Grand Guignol for the postmodern crowd. A woman jumps into an electrified pool and explodes. Yet, despite laughter in the screening auditorium I attended, the comedy is notably uncomfortable, as if Perkins is inviting us to laugh and then asking why we did so. There's a tense undercurrent of inevitability as the film implicates the audience in its massacre. We often say that God has a sense of humor when good things happen in roundabout or odd ways; what if Death has a sense of humor, too?

You might wonder why I bring God into a discussion of this amoral, bleak, grotesque exercise in violence and irreverent humor. But the film's ending, which I won't spoil here, suggests that Perkins himself has some biblical ideas in mind regarding the nature of the monkey and its task among humanity, and its inclusion of a specific apocalyptic character is presented in earnest, not in satire. Perhaps he's saying that if Death can laugh at us, we should laugh back at it; a worthy message itself, this gains power when you consider Perkins's personal story as well as King's. We know about his father -- a relationship that still arouses curiosity among fans, especially as daddy issues keep cropping up in Perkins's films -- but a little-known factoid is that Perkins's mother died on the plane that struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. As Longlegs was clearly more about Anthony Perkins and The Monkey has more heart for Berry Berenson, I'd be curious to see them billed in a double feature together and would love to hear Perkins give a talkback. That would be a therapy session for the ages!

Perkins, as writer and director, added a lot to King's story, making it his own in the process. Yet it's a lean, mean hour and a half of adrenaline and violence with nary an ounce of unnecessary weight. No matter how interested I might be in the auteur's influence, the point remains that this is a straightforward and accessible film about random death and a cosmic indifference or even cruelty toward human life. Our age of "elevated horror" and films that require dissertations (or shitty YouTube videos) to explain their nuanced intricacies needs films like The Monkey to jump in, shake things up, and leave us wanting more. I hope we don't get it.