THE MONKEY Review: This Toy Is Scary As Hell And It Means Business

After shocking the horror world last year with box office juggernaut Longlegs, director Osgood Perkins returns with a gonzo adaptation of one of Stephen King’s most nihilistic short stories in The Monkey. Revamping the story from a morose, chaotic, paranoid chiller to a balls-out gory black comedy, Perkins continues his movement from slow-horror icon to alt-populist crowd-pleaser with this darkly hilarious tale of a wind-up monkey with a mind of its own.

Hal (Theo James, Divergent) seems like kind of a loser. Having survived a chaotic youth with shitheel twin brother, Bill, Hal has cut himself off from anyone who might care about him, including his estranged son Petey (Colin O’Brien). It’s hard to blame him, though. Hal lived through the deaths of both parents and a number of people in his extended circle when he was young, and all because of a wind-up monkey he found in his father’s storage.

Now Hal is grown, and try though he may to put his past behind him, it keeps turning up like a bad penny. When he is called back to his hometown to clean up after his Aunt Ida’s death, the killings resume in all manner of nasty accidents. Hal knows they aren’t accidents; the monkey is back, and its bloodthirst has awakened. But it doesn’t kill by itself: someone has to turn the key, and Hal and Petey have to find out who that is before their turn comes up.

The Monkey is batshit insane. With this latest feature, Perkins reveals a deeply morbid sense of humor only hinted at in his previous films, painting the screen red with gleefully executed extreme gore gags aplenty.

The Stephen King story on which the film is based is not one of his goofier tales; in the book, the monkey itself is never directly implicated in the death that seems to surround it. Hal vilifies the toy on faith, associating the carnage the surrounds him with the monkey’s action without any kind of direct, obvious link. Perkins casts away all doubts here. Hal isn’t paranoid, it is obvious: this monkey means business.

Bouncing back and forth between Hal and Bill’s youth and the present day – a structure borrowed from the short story – Perkins manages the audience’s understanding of the monkey’s capabilities brilliantly, while also building crucial links between characters, largely through hilariously off-kilter dialogue and awkward interactions. We are brought into Hal’s world and empathize with his present predicament of trying to keep his family safe without completely abandoning them. It’s a tightrope he is trying – unsuccessfully – to walk with Petey, but once the toy resurfaces, they have to get past their not-so-petty abandonment issues pretty damn quick if they are going to survive.

After the tense procedural horror that was Longlegs, Perkins has his job cut out for him in creating this new experience for the audience. Thankfully, The Monkey jumps into this challenge with both feet with a dark-and-stormy-night prologue at a pawn shop that both introduces us to the monkey and sets the tone with a spectacularly executed gore gag that sets a high bar for the action to follow, which the film matches or exceeds frequently.  It’s an attention getter, and signals to the audience that anything can happen over the next 98 minutes, and indeed, everything will.

Theo James excels in his dual performances as the milquetoast, overly cautious Hal and his mulleted dickhead twin brother Bill – the two being twins is a Perkins invention, King wrote them as brothers – clearly delineating the chasm of personality between the two. Where Hall was a quiet, put-upon youth, Bill was – to put it politely – rambunctious, often reveling in his younger (by two minutes) brother’s misfortune. These characteristics follow them into adulthood, leading them to lose touch with each other over clashing ideas of what brotherly love actually means.

The younger versions of Hal/Bill are played with equal finesse by Christian Convery (Cocaine Bear), putting in equally great work on both ends of the spectrum. They share the screen with an implacably morose Tatiana Maslany as their mother, Lois, who delights with a series of uber-goth bon mots like, “Everybody dies, and that’s life” delivered with such confident deadpan that it’s almost impenetrable, just before breaking into a funereal dance party with her sons.

The boys later find themselves in the care of their Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy) and her husband, who both provide a whole new layer of pitch-black comedy to the mix. That’s not to mention the many brilliant cameos that it’s perhaps best not to spoil this early. Perkins nails every minute of it.

There’s always a danger when adapting King to screen. The writer has a particular cadence and rhythm to his dialogue that may work on the page but often fails to translate into spoken dialogue. Some of the best adaptations of his work have taken moderate liberties with the words, and some of the greatest disappointments treat King’s dialogue like gospel.

Perkins’ script splits the difference in interesting ways. By injecting an infectious layer of fun into the morbid goings-on, he’s able to engage the spirit of King’s typical dialogue without being slavish to it. It wouldn’t work in this case, anyway, as the dialogue in the short story doesn’t fit the tone of the film, but it’s fascinating to see how he’s infused the film with the character of King’s lighter works to transform the experience.

One of Perkins’ greatest victories in moving from the page to the big screen is imbuing a sense of play into the story. King’s version certainly talks a lot about the deaths of the people around young Hal and Bill, but they are almost entirely unremarkable scenes, lending the story a kind of ambivalence about the true nature of the evil at play.

Perkins, on the other hand, goes whole hog, staging some of the greatest splatter I’ve seen in a mainstream horror film in years. The Monkey has the energy of Raimi in his prime combined with and almost Solondz-esque dystopian energy that lands firmly in the realm of existential splatstick, a lovely place to be, if you ask me.

Before Longlegs, I had written Oz Perkins off as a distinctly not-for-me filmmaker, making slow films that preferred extended sequences that implied dread over what I see as actual terror. After that last film blew me away, I was back in the game, and with The Monkey, Perkins now has my full faith.

This is a genuinely new direction for Perkins as a filmmaker, and I don’t know where he goes from here, but he can count on me as being along for the ride. The Monkey is a giddily disgusting gorefest that is packed with genuine laugh out loud moments, vivid characterizations, multiple exploding bodies, and one scary as hell wind-up monkey holding it all together. I can’t wait to see it again.

The film opens February 21, only in movie theaters, via Neon. Visit the official site for more information.