Director/Screenplay – Osgood Perkins, Based on the Short Story The Monkey (1980) by Stephen King, Producers – Dave Caplan, Chris Ferguson, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones & James Wan, Photography – Nico Aguilar, Music – Edo Van Breeman, Visual Effects Supervisor – Edward J. Douglas, Production Design – Danny Vermette. Production Company – TSC/Atomic Monster/Range and Oddfellows.
Cast
Theo James (Hal Shelburn/Bill Shelburn), Christian Convery (Young Hal/Bill), Tatiana Maslany (Lois Shelburn), Colin O’Brien (Petey Shelburn), Elijah Wood (Ted Hammerman), Rohan Campbell (Ricky), Sarah Levy (Aunt Ida), Osgood Perkins (Uncle Chip), [uncredited] Adam Scott (Captain Petey Shelburn), Danica Dreyer (Babysitter Annie Wilkes), Tess Degenstein (Barbara), Laura Mennell (Petey’s Mom), Shafin Karim (Pawn Shop Owner), Zia Newton (Dwayne), Lumen Beltran (Police Officer)
Plot
Back in 1999, Hal Shelburn and his brother Bill were going through the belongings left by their father who had abandoned them. Among these, they found a toy wind-up monkey that beats a drum when the key in its back is wound. After Bill wound the monkey, their babysitter died in a freak accident in a sushi restaurant. Bill gave the monkey to Hal but when he wound it, hoping to kill Bill, it instead killed their mother with a freak aneurism. After they were relocated with relatives in Casco, Maine, the monkey killed their uncle. The two brothers decided to bury the monkey down the well. Twenty-five years later. Hal now lives in reclusion and is gives a week to spend with his son Petey before he loses custody. After their aunt dies, Hal is called by Bill telling him to go the house. There Hal finds that the monkey has been retrieved and sold in the estate sale and is now indiscriminately killing people around the town.
Osgood Perkins, sometimes also credited as Oz Perkins, has been a genre director whose rise has been fascinating to watch in the last few years. Perkins first appeared with the enigmatic The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015) and the ghost story I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016), both of which gained reasonable word of mouth. I was very impressed with his third film Gretel & Hansel (2020), a dark take on the fairytale. Most recently, he had the reasonable success of the serial killer thriller Longlegs (2024). Perkins has also written the scripts for the thriller Cold Comes the Night (2013) and the horror films Removal (2010) and The Girl in the Photographs (2015), plus has several acting credits.
Perkins makes an adaptation of the Stephen King short story The Monkey (1980), which can be found in his Skeleton Crew (1985) collection. The original is a fairly simple affair concerning Hal Shelburn whose son discovers the toy monkey in the attic, which Hal believes is responsible for a series of deaths when it is wound up. There is no twin brother in the original story, while the effects of the monkey have been considerably elaborated out. The film is produced by James Wan’s Atomic Monster production company,
Osgood Perkins gives the impression he didn’t treat proceedings seriously: “I took liberties like a motherfucker. They [Atomic Monster] had a very serious script. Very serious. I felt it was too serious, and I told them: ‘This doesn’t work for me. The thing with this toy monkey is that the people around it all die in insane ways. So, I thought: Well, I’m an expert on that.’ Both my parents died in insane, headline-making ways.” [His father, the actor Anthony Perkins, died of AIDS, while his mother Berry Berenson was aboard one of the planes that flew into the World Trade Center on 9/11]. “I spent a lot of my life recovering from tragedy, feeling quite bad. It all seemed inherently unfair. You personalize the grief: ‘Why is this happening to me?’ But I’m older now and you realize this shit happens to everyone. Everyone dies. Sometimes in their sleep, sometimes in truly insane ways, like I experienced. But everyone dies. And I thought maybe the best way to approach that insane notion is with a smile.”
The cursed toy monkey
In Perkins’ hands, what was a relatively straightforward King story about a Cursed Objects gets transformed into something resembling Final Destination (2000) and sequels where the monkey arranges a series of bizarre deaths every time it is wound. There’s the attention-grabbing second death where the boys are taken to a sushi restaurant by babysitter Danica Dreyer who is making eyes with the chef before a shot where a slice casually appears on her throat in the background and in the next she turns to look at young Christian Convery and her severed head falls off onto the teppanyaki grill and starts to sizzle.
Osgood Perkins has a small mastery of disquiet. The Monkey comes with an odd tone where things seem to be off – from Tatiana Maslany’s mother lecturing the boys about death after the funeral, to a very weird priest giving the ceremony to Osgood Perkins himself in a cameo as the uncle who tells Christian Convery he is a swinger and will be an awful uncle. Equally, Perkins has an eye for the grotesque – the remains of Osgood’s uncle after he has been trampled by a stampede of horses where his sleeping bag is opened and is said to resemble cherry pie that has been stomped on; the aunt (Sarah Levy) who falls through a broken stair to get Christmas lights impaled in her face, then has her head set alight by the burner on a stove, stumbles outside head aflame and gets her foot stuck in a vase and then runs in to a realtor’s sign to be impaled through the eye standing up.
For a time, it looks The Monkey is a film that consists of just Osgood Perkins serving up a parade of bizarre deaths. To wit we get:- A scene where the realtor (Tess Degenstein) opens a closet and is blown away by a falling shotgun. Somehow Rohan Campbell shoots a bullet hole in the car window and an entire nest of bees enter through that in a massed swarm and fill his mouth. And a bizarrely funny scene where Theo James is talking on the phone as an air conditioning unit falls into the pool behind him just as a woman goes to dive in and is instantly electrocuted raining Theo in body parts (something that would never happen in reality – an AC dropped into a pool would simply short out. If it were still active, it might deliver 120v around – the amount of shock a defibrillator would. It would take a heck of a lot more to blow apart a body the moment it touches the water). There is a little bit more plot to the proceedings than there is in the Final Destination series around various filial rivalries, but not much more.
