Depending on how one wants to categorize ground chuck, at least two people in The Monkey are ground into it. The first is the victim of a horse stampede, and the other becomes a meaty mess via lawnmower.
We learn about the former when a sleeping bag is casually overturned, slopping out smushed man-oatmeal. The lawn care incident unfolds in full view of a neighbor who chugs beer while increasingly bathed in viscera.
At least one plane falls out of the sky in The Monkey, too, an image that does not pair well with recent news reports about mid-air collisions and belly-up passenger flights. Maybe this crap shoot we call being alive—no moral balance or cosmic intention guiding the myriad ways we living things ultimately kick the bucket—gets to you. Maybe you plan on traveling soon. Maybe your every waking moment endures the uneasy feeling that the world is just not working as it should. Do not worry: The Monkey will exploit that anxiety. This is a lot more fun than I make it sound.
Following only seven months after the premiere of writer-director Osgood Perkins’ previous film, forbidding serial killer thriller Longlegs, The Monkey is the dripping, self-satisfied response to its predecessor’s dreaded self-seriousness. Where Longlegs gapes in horror at the meaninglessness of death, The Monkey gets a belly laugh out of the meaninglessness of life, treating the eradication of the human body like a punchline.
“Everybody dies,” Lois Shellburn (Tatiana Maslany) tells her twin sons Bill and Hal (Christian Convery) after they’ve witnessed their babysitter’s accidental demise, an unfortunate sacrifice to a hibachi grill, “…and that’s life.”
Over the course of The Monkey, Bill and Hal will be exposed to plenty more death, drenched in it in fact, so many deaths that their lives come to be defined by the anticipation of obliteration. This may also have to do with their family’s possession of a widely-grinning wind-up mechanical monkey, wearing red organ grinder vest and bearing a simian-sized snare drum, who likely murdered their babysitter.
Loosely based on a Stephen King short story first published in 1980, The Monkey bears a few hallmarks of the author’s work (e.g, set in Maine, bad dads, childhoods darkened by the shadow of violence) but expands the story into a much more sardonic smorgasbord of squelching delights.
“Hal, this is some fucked up shit,” Hal’s teenage son Petey (Colin O’Brien) tells him. The kid has a point.
Petey spends much of The Monkey reminding his dad, adult Hal (Theo James), that Hal is an incompetent father who is exposing his son to reams of psychologically debilitating experiences. Unfortunately, Hal has inherited the titular clockwork primate from his own dad (Adam Scott), who we briefly meet in the movie’s cold open when he attempts to pawn and incinerate the aforementioned mechanical monkey.
Adult Hal narrates in voice over, his delivery a poindexter deadpan, that the monkey somehow survived. Their dad does not, because, as Lois asserted, such is life. In fact, left to get to know their dead dad by going through the closet of ephemera collected from his world travels, young Hal and Bill discover a pink hat box adorned with the inscription “Like Life.” Inside, the monkey’s unnerving, grinning face—eyes bugged out and molten, pursed lips meted out by a row of concrete-yellow enamel—peers up at them.
Soon, Hal and Bill come to understand the burden their dad’s bequeathed them. By twisting the key on its back, waking up its sentient gears to raise its furry arms and spin its little drumsticks, they can set into motion a Rube-Goldberg-like sequence that will terminate in someone’s…er…termination. They just can’t control who inevitably bites it at the business end of a harpoon, bowling ball, shotgun, kitchen knife, brain aneurysm, etc.
Cinematographer Nico Aguilar finds a feast of texture in The Monkey’s many-splendored delirium of violence. Flesh tends to burst rather than split; orifices erupt rather than leak. The empty spaces of his compositions beg the viewer to search the frame for the Sword of Damocles—maybe a frayed wire or a teetering clock—destined to transform the everyday setting into a sumptuous disaster-scape.
But the film’s images are never richer than when close up on the monkey’s fiendish face, and Aguilar leans into the faux animal’s menacing splines, able to conjure plenty of dream-like visions that help the audience understand how two young boys could be so enchanted by what the toy monkey promises.
Perkins may even be enchanted by the monkey too. Widening the scope of King’s anxious ditty, he builds a small mythos around the monkey’s power—turning the key on its back permits it to kill, but the monkey chooses its victims, the key-turner immune, and so on—thereby cranking up the wickedness of the film’s tone. Whereas the short story treats the monkey as an elemental force, a concept impossible to really grasp, the monkey of The Monkey is a weapon, something Hal and Bill can wield to beat back the rising tide of their traumatic childhoods.
Yes, The Monkey is about trauma. Contemporary horror is slathered in it—look only to Wolf Man, released last month and already on VOD, which contains a scene of a were-dad (Christopher Abbott) saying this exact thing, almost verbatim: “Sometimes when you’re a daddy, you’re so scared of your kids getting scars that you become the thing that scars them.” He defines trauma for his daughter while simultaneously traumatizing her. This is our entertainment now: explaining trauma to the traumatized.
Perkins is likely no stranger to trauma. His father, iconic actor Anthony Perkins, died of complications from AIDS in the early ‘90s, at a time when so little was understood about the disease and so much feared. His mother, Berry Berenson, died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Parallels between the director’s work and his life abound. And still, The Monkey never lets the bleakness take over.
Instead, the film’s a good time from tooth to tail, endearingly sappy but undeniably cold-blooded, an irreverent, (mean-)spirited, and occasionally hilarious celebration of the painful truth at the heart of the human experience. Death comes for us all—isn’t that funny?
The Monkey opens in wide release on Fri March 21.
