Director – Osgood Perkins – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 98m
****
An automaton monkey found by two twins causes horrific deaths to people around them – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 21st
This sets its tone early on with a framing story in which a junk store owner is asked by mild-mannered, bespectacled protagonist Hal (Theo James, who also plays his twin brother Bill) to take a clockwork monkey off his hands, insisting that the object, whatever it might be, is not a toy. The store owner is sceptical. More fool him, because he is about to undergo one of many sudden, gruesome and unexpected deaths of which the film offers a gorehound’s smorgasboard.
Other notable characters include their mum Lois (Tatania Maslany from Woman in Gold, Simon Curtis, 2015; Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg, 2007), Hal’s estranged son Petey (Colin O’Brien from Wonka, Paul King, 2023) and Petey’s stepfather Ted (Elijah Wood from The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson, 2001-3).
This Stephen King adaptation comes from the school of horror films which are, basically, an excuse for staging a series of sudden, gruesome and unexpected deaths. Inventiveness is high on the menu, provided you accept that killing multiple people in unique and spectacular ways can be said to be inventive. People, most of them never given time to develop beyond the sketchiest of characters, dive into electrified swimming pools, are killed by loaded shotguns falling out of closets as they open doors, or have their mouths rapidly filled by projectiles of a mass of living insects. As the narrative progresses, the deaths become ever more ridiculous; indeed, their staging is often laugh out loud funny. The humour derives from the stupidity and implausibility of the whole.
Just how bonkers does this get? A (shapely, young, bikini-clad) woman with whom the film never engages, and who is seen only in the distance, is on a diving board about to dive into a pool when an electrical item (some sort of heating or cooling fan? It doesn’t matter) falls into the water, rendering it electrically live. “No, don’t” (or similar), says Hal, but either she doesn’t hear him or she hears him too late. Either way, if the film was attempting any sort of realism, once live electrical item hits the water, you would expect electrical flashes and possibly charred flesh (think: Bond throws an electric fire into an adversary’s bath at the start of Goldfinger, Guy Hamilton, 1964). Instead, she blows up, with multiple severed body parts flying through the air. This is both burlesque and very funny, but it’s most definitely not realism. And since the character is little more than a stage prop, we don’t care about her one iota.
To anyone who has seen director Perkins’ previous outing, the extraordinarily unsettling Longlegs (2024), where much is made of building characters through script explored by depth of actors’ performances, this couldn’t be a more different type of horror film; it’s a likeable, jokey, horror comedy. Except, there’s something else very interesting going on too. Characters talk about (and the film’s marketing slogan is): “Everybody dies. And that’s fucked.” Actually, there’s also a second, similar slogan, voicing almost, but not quite, the same sentiment: “Everybody dies. And that’s life.” Which is true. And while, in real life, most people die in much less spectacular ways than people do here, they do, all, eventually, die. We do, all, eventually, die.
After watching, I was initially prepared to dismiss this as gratuitous, shallow, gorehound-pleasing horror, but as I pondered the film, my perception changed. Yes, it’s a very silly, gory, sometimes hilarious, sometimes tedious, horror audience-pleaser. Peel back that superficial facade, however, and the subject is something quite different. Human mortality. (A subject to which the wider horror genre is no stranger.) The monkey, whose actions, wilful or automatic, predestined or freely willed, cause individuals their fatal varieties of mayhem, stands as a personification of death. A variant on the traditional figure of the Grim Reaper.
As witnessed by the ever-increasing presence of an army of cheerleaders waving pompoms and chanting as the body count ludicrously rises, the film celebrates the fact of these deaths. We all ignore death, it seems to say, but death comes for us all eventually. And that’s something to get excited about. In fact, it’s almost like a party. Which, if you stop and think about it, is a pretty weird approach.
The Monkey is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, February 21st.
Teaser Trailer:
Redband Trailer: