A Movie That Has Fun With the Inevitability of Death
Last year, the writer-director Oz Perkins released a film called Longlegs that was a surprise critical and box-office smash. It was a nasty, unsettling thriller in the vein of The Silence of the Lambs, and it gleefully defied internal logic; the film trended more toward “vibes,” as the FBI-agent protagonist matched wits with an inexplicable, demonic evil. Perkins’s follow-up, The Monkey—adapted from a short story by Stephen King—is another tonally wild take on the horror genre: arch, gleefully gory, and played for dark, rueful laughs. It’s also a more explicit mission statement of sorts than Longlegs, as if the filmmaker is holding the audience by the shoulders and lecturing them: When it comes to death, there are no rules.
That’s a defiant stance for a horror movie to take. The tropes of Hollywood’s favorite slasher franchises have become so easy to spot (Don’t have sex! Don’t say you’ll be right back!) that they inspired an entire series about serial killers who are psychotically fixated on following the genre’s principles. At first, the premise of The Monkey suggests the same sort of cause-and-effect setup. See, there’s this scary monkey toy—a vintage windup doll that creepily plays the drums—and whenever it gets set off, someone around it dies. But it doesn’t take long for Perkins to discard that schematic formula in favor of a more surprising turn of events.
The Monkey follows the twin boys who encounter the toy, which wreaks havoc on their family. The boys then spend decades trying to figure out how to command it. Yes, the monkey ends lives, but maybe its owners can direct that power at people they don’t like, protect those they love, or avoid the toy’s will entirely. As the story trundles along, Perkins’s point comes into focus: There’s no controlling death, even if you can turn a literal key to set your own demise in motion.
[Read: Yes, Longlegs is that scary]
If that sounds bleak, well, it is. Perkins apparently can’t avoid projecting his mordant worldview onto his work, even if he’s making an anarchic comedy. The filmmaker’s previous features, beyond Longlegs, were intimate, atmospheric horror works; any shift in mood is striking for him. The Monkey manages to lean full-force into sight gags and dry one-liners while still making plenty of room for beheadings, electrocutions, and a death-by-beehive sequence that has to be seen to be understood.
The film begins with a cute prologue involving a manic-seeming Adam Scott, in an airline-pilot outfit, attempting to offload the cursed monkey toy at a pawnshop. We learn that he’s the father of Hal and Bill Shelburn (both played by Christian Convery and, as adults, Theo James) and that he vanished from their lives, leaving behind the monkey and the boys’ stressed-out mom (the great Tatiana Maslany). Chaos quickly unfolds when the bickering, different-strokes twins find the calamitous heirloom—although Perkins keeps the first act mostly mournful, as the boys struggle with the onslaught of death around them.
In the hands of another director, the tone could wobble too wildly. Perkins is a specialist in making childhood trauma feel grounded and relatable, however, and that holds true for the loopy scares of his latest movie. His own youth is rich, dark territory that he’s admitted to obliquely mining for past projects. (Perkins is the son of the late Anthony Perkins, the star of such horror classics as Psycho.) Although The Monkey is a (loose) translation of another author’s work, it also feels like a lighter flip side to the much more personal Longlegs: Both films plumb themes of parental shortcomings and the ways in which early-life distress can reverberate weirdly into adulthood.
[Read: A horror movie that already gave away its twist]
James initially appears to be an odd casting choice as the adult Hal and Bill—each twin, in separate ways, grows up to be a dead-end loser, and the White Lotus star is too ridiculously, straightforwardly handsome to buy as a total failure. But that incongruity becomes part of The Monkey’s strange sense of humor. Hal is the film’s main character, and he is clearly a smart and possibly even charming person; he has nonetheless decided on a life of intentional drudgery, in an effort to avoid the monkey’s curse. As such, Hal spends much of the movie resisting springing into action. But Perkins uses James’s physicality—the actor is visibly chiseled—to signal to the audience that Hal is fully capable of confrontation, if and when needed.
Bill (absent from King’s story) is Hal’s raging id, who has decided to embrace the monkey’s chaos for his own gain. He winds the key over and over again, seeking to game the toy’s results. Bill’s obsession compels Hal to return home, hoping to talk some sense into his brother. It also leads to a panoply of brutal carnage, with heads and limbs flying across the screen every few minutes. Underpinning both of the characters’ behavior is their fundamental unease at death’s randomness; that’s the freaky truth that Perkins knows is enough to keep viewers hooked, even as things go hilariously askew. Another kill is coming, and because we’re in this peculiar, mischievous film, it’ll be a playful one. But the outcome will always be the same: Someone who was once there is now gone. In the face of that chilling, prosaic nightmare, all Perkins can do is laugh.