The Monkey (2025)

I haven't loved most of Perkins' films. Even his much lauded Longlegs left me feeling a bit blah. For me Perkins often is unable to connect his terror to emotion in a way that make it land. I feel this remains true with his Stephen King adaptation The Monkey, a film that focuses on family trauma but often the film feels more about the spectacle and comedy than the emotional resonance, perhaps this is somewhat amplified by it's focus on humour over chills. 

The Monkey takes King's story and adds a lot of accoutrements (an evil twin storyline, an estranged son plot) but never truly connects the dots. The film goes through the motions of attempting to reunite our main character (played stoically by James) with his son but it never feels real. Mostly every relationship is played for laughs. The one exception might be the relationship with the protagonist's mother which gets a little bit of gravitas. A call back to this at the end of the film does hit even if the film barely touches on it before returning to its macabre humour approach. 

One of the main themes of the story (both here and in the short story) is the abandonment by a father. The film turns that almost entirely into a joke. It's like the film is one bit immature frat boy who can't focus on what he's feeling to he bombastically goes for laughs. And that's the The Monkey does well. Watching one spectacularly gruesome and hilarious cartoon death after another is rather entertaining. And don't worry the film never lingers long enough for you to feel anything other than a kind of shock laughter (a woman running with a burning baby carriage is a blink of an eye shot so we don't have to wrestle with that image) so this won't make it hard to sleep at night. Horror comedy is a good thing and The Monkey does this right. It just doesn't aspire to do anything else. It isn't even satire. It doesn't comment on anything. It's just about laughing at how gross something can be. 

Don't go into The Monkey expecting scares. There is nothing scary about this film. Other than the toy Monkey of the title being a cliche for what we think of when we think of creepy historic toys, there is nothing in the imagery, the suspense, nor the threat itself which will scare you, get under your skin, or haunt you. The Monkey is just for light, forgettable fun. 

The Monkey

Starring: Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Elijah Wood, Christian Convery, Colin O'Brien, Rohan Campbell, Sarah Levy 

Writer/Director: Osgood Perkins