Having given us one of 2024’s great horror films with ‘Longlegs’, director Osgood Perkins turns to more conventional commercial horror with his adaptation of Stephen King’s short story,’The Monkey’.
Setting the tone in the opening scene where the father of twins Hal & Bill Shellburne (both played by Christian Convery) brings in a clockwork toy, a dead eyed monkey with a rictus grin and presumably modelled on Amanda Holden. But this is no toy as characters throughout the film are only too keen to emphasize and the father is desperate to offload it on to a pawnbroker. It ends in brutal comic book violence because this clockwork monkey once wound will see death visited upon someone in the most spectacularly gruesome and inventive manner.
And yet with their father now gone the twin boys now live with their mother and the monkey, seemingly destroyed irreparably by their late father, now suddenly pops up again when they find it in a cupboard. Let the carnage commence because once again when the monkey is wound up death comes down. And after a babysitter and even their own mother come to a grisly end the twins throw the monkey down a deep well hoping that this will be the end of the carnage.
Twenty five years later the twins are now played by Theo James – Hal is the introvert who has deliberately kept away from his now former wife and son, seeing him only once a year, afraid that the monkey will somehow bring about their demise. Whereas Bill remains as irritatingly unpleasant as he was as a boy. It seems that the monkey, regardless of what is done to it, is impervious to anything, a harbinger of misery and doom that will just never go away and is rumoured to be the template for new film, ‘The Meghan Markle story’. Bill is determined to reunite with Hal and his son so they can deal with the toy that has come back into his life and obviously this will not end well for anyone.
This certainly is a contender for the most creative and bloody on screens deaths seen in cinema this year and shot in such a way to make you hurl chunks and at the same time laugh with some bleakly black comedy. Those deaths are clearly a source of creative glee for Perkins and are similar to those set pieces in Final Destination, where audiences will be trying to second guess how characters will meet their maker in scenes where they will end up as bloody bags of viscera. Yet despite the gleeful gore there is a sense of diminishing returns as the deaths pile up.
At 98 minutes it moves along swiftly glossing over any rationale or mythology as to why the toy keeps popping up or why it does what it does and The Monkey plays very much as a cartoon counterpart to Oswood Perkins far more heavyweight ‘Longlegs’.
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Here’s The Monkey trailer…..
