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.

Dual (2022)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Karen Gillan leads with not one but two of her best performances yet in the aptly titled Dual, a satirical science fiction thriller that was released under just about every radar last year. The Doctor Who, Jumanji, MCU, and Oculus actress plays Sarah, a depressed young woman who prefers isolation to engaging with her pestering mother and emotionally distant boyfriend. One wonders if this is a chicken-or-egg situation, and if Sarah has driven them away or vice versa. Suddenly stricken with a terminal (and gory) illness, Sarah keeps her condition a secret while she explores her options. She elects a somewhat experimental and sensational path forward: to create a clone of herself to live on after her own death, to protect her loved ones from the pain of losing her.

The world of Dual is very realistic, one that could generally be our own world, except for this cloning technology. The "replacement" process is touted as a loving practice for family and friends, one that is minimally invasive (apparently the clone is created almost instantly from only a drop of your saliva) and requires only some time with the original to learn mannerisms, facts and details, and personality traits. The transition from original to replacement is supposed to be seamless and heartwarming. Of course, that's not the case, as sometimes the original survives the terminal diagnosis. By this point, the clone has generally become a full person and doesn't want to be "decommissioned"; when this happens, the two identical people are made to duel to the death. 

Hence the title, which plays off both the dual nature of Sarah and the duel she needs to prepare for with her clone. Because her replacement, from their introduction, has no interest in copying Sarah. She's assertive, challenging, and independent; her different eye color is suggested by a clone technician immediately to be a "glitch," though he has no idea how deep the glitch goes. The clone is more confident, more sexual, more assertive, more fun; Sarah's mother and boyfriend both prefer the clone, and so Sarah finds herself a stranger in her own life. So Sarah, miraculously cured from her terminal illness, decides to duel her clone. Over the course of one year, she trains rigorously (under a combat trainer named Aaron Paul, which is hilarious to me) to prepare to survive and reclaim her life.

Interesting thoughts that are suggested but never quite explored litter this film, such as the offhanded remark that Sarah doesn't need to worry about paying for her replacement because the clone, as the survivor, will be billed. Every time the film starts to suggest intrigue around the anxiety-inducing uncanny implications of having another version of yourself running around messing up your life, it shies away from even smart conversations about it. It's not a fault of the director or actors, but of the screenplay, which is almost exclusively interested in Sarah's process of training for the duel and then, of course, the outcome of that confrontation. Ordinarily, big ideas like this -- talk about a life debt -- deserve more consideration and time, but Dual is so lean and mean in its incisive look at the psychology of the two Sarahs that it doesn't need to dwell on more cerebral, existential themes. Can you fault it for being what it is, even though it could have been far more interesting, even based on its title, which in retrospect should have been titled Duel?

Then again, in enduring all the unsatisfying blank spaces that this film creates, one wonders if we're meant to feel as liminal as the central characters. The "double" concept has been used extensively throughout cinema, notably from Hitchcock and Roeg and De Palma, and has even featured in several recent movies, such as Infinity Pool just this year. Perhaps it's a theme that will resurrect in the wake of Covid-19, the kind of dual consciousness not of race or ethnicity but of a trauma response to having very different public and private personae.