The Monkey (2025) review

Dir. Osgood “Oz” Perkins

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★½

When watching The Monkey, you can almost visualize an energized Osgood Perkins rifling through the pages of Atomic Monster’s script, scribbling edits, rewriting entire lines of dialog, and putting a cheeky stamp on something that was initially supposed to be serious. Way too serious. The film is an adaptation of Stephen King’s short story of the same name, written at a time when spooky toys were among the freshest of ideas in the horror landscape. Keep in mind, we hadn’t been introduced to Chucky yet. Even Puppet Master was still almost a decade away.

In 2025, the idea of a toy monkey being the bearer of violence is tacky. This is likely why Perkins decided his Monkey adaptation would take a more humorous tone and approach. Here’s a man all-too-familiar with the randomness of death, not to mention the suddenness. His father, the late, great Anthony Perkins (Norman Bates in Psycho) died of AIDS at the age of 60; his mother, Berry Berenson, even younger, perished in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. You can’t make a movie about death that’s as funny nor as visceral as The Monkey without witnessing it firsthand.

Marrying a wacky, playful tone to gruesome bloodshed, as if Gremlins and It had a love-child, Perkins’ latest doesn’t treat us to another story of generational trauma that’s bleak and full of despair. It opens with two young twin brothers, Bill and Hal (both played by Christian Convery), who discover a toy monkey that belonged to their absentee father. When you wind up the monkey, it plays a drum. When it stops, someone within your vicinity dies in a horrific manner, so bizarre and unusual that it would make Rube Goldberg smile.

Bill mercilessly abuses Hal, to the point where Hal dreams of killing his brother. Their broken-hearted mother, Lois (Tatiana Maslany), is too self-absorbed to pay them much mind, but does instill them the brutally honesty nugget that death is random. Some people die in their sleep. Some die in horrific ways. “It is what it is, and that’s the word of God,” to quote the preacher at a funeral the family attends.

After one too many brushes with death at the hands of the monkey, Bill and Hal dispose of the toy at the bottom of a well. They go their separate ways as adults, but 25 years later, folks in a sleepy Maine locale begin dying in absurd ways that suggest the monkey has returned. Hal (now played by Theo James) is divorced, but fears for the safety of his teenage son, Petey (Colin O’Brien), prompting him to rekindle a relationship with Bill (also James) and figure out how the monkey has returned.

It’s natural that some will want to find common threads between The Monkey and Perkins’ Longlegs seeing as the two were released within a calendar year of one another. While themes of parental overreach and the vulnerability of children might be similar on the surface, Perkins’ approach to both is radically different. Longlegs reveled in lingering suspense, practically choking the audience with dread despite making no bones about who the killer from very early into the film. The Monkey, on the other hand, defies suspense. The deaths are not explicitly foreshadowed and often act as cruel jokes — macabre punchlines delivered with the impact of a blow to the head. This is the kind of movie that would make the late, great Norm Macdonald cackle.

There’s one line I won’t soon get over, for its blunt hilarity and delivery, at the hands of a character who is only present in one scene. In short, she tells Hal that in times of tragedy or mass casualties, her grandmother used to say, “well, looks like God’s bowling strikes tonight!” That’s the kind of humor that dominates The Monkey: it’s dry, deadpan, disturbing, yet dastardly funny.

The toy monkey itself is an apt metaphor for both intergenerational trauma and the randomness of death. Through narration, Hal notes that the monkey doesn’t take requests, seemingly has the ability to teleport and put itself back together even after being destroyed, and usually kills someone you love. No explanation is given as to how the monkey can follow the boys. None is necessary. There’s no justification when your mother and father pass before they hit their golden years. There’s no reason why assholes seemingly live forever while the good die young. There’s no reason kind-hearted people suffer. It’s all about how you process these things and try to make life enjoyable for the next generation, and if you can, as Steely Dan once eloquently put it, laugh at the frozen rain, more power to you.

Perkins seems giddy to foreground this black sense of humor into one of his films, which mostly had an aura of comedy, though never this blunt. Theo James is up to the challenge of playing two vastly different, troubled souls. His performance as the neurotic Hal is intensely captivating. Similarly, Tatiana Maslany latches onto the tone of Perkins’ material perfectly, delivering acidic lines of dialog with timing and irony readily apparent. Perkins himself turns up for a cameo as Bill and Hal’s uncle while Elijah Wood has one brief scene as Petey’s stepfather, equipped with an obnoxiously large water bottle. Not unlike the large, looming portrait of Bill Clinton above Agent Carter’s desk in Longlegs, Perkins fancies is someone who finds humor in pop art.

The Monkey will not be everyone’s bag. I already see serious dissent on social media, which is understandable given Perkins’ abject refusal to be too serious, while at the same time, treading in territory that is heartfelt. For my mileage, it’s so very difficult to hate a movie where, one moment, someone is having a lucid nightmare, and then in a matter of beats, witnessing another person jumping into an electrified swimming pool before literally exploding into a shower of red mist. Not to mention, as someone with a pair of uncles who haven’t spoken in over 30 years, and who has experienced a wealth of loss this decade, this hit closer to home than I ever imagined. That said, The Monkey doesn’t take itself very seriously. You shouldn’t either.

NOTE: Take a listen to my interview with Osgood Perkins, where we chat about The Monkey, Longlegs, and more!

My review of Gretel & Hansel (2020)
My review of Longlegs (2024)

Starring: Theo James, Colin O’Brien, Christian Convery, Tatiana Maslany, Sarah Levy, Osgood Perkins, and Elijah Wood. Directed by: Osgood “Oz” Perkins.