A man killed by vape, a woman blown to bits on diving into a swimming pool. Fish hooks, a coffee steamer, on they go, the vectors of weird death, in Osgood Perkins’s The Monkey, a Stephen King story tricked out with Final Destination-style ingenuity and given a comedy-macabre polish.
Groans followed by chortles is the idea, with the reactions stopping this side of disgust, as Perkins tells the story of twins who grow up to be adult versions of the milquetoast/asshole combo they are as kids and the malevolent mechanical monkey that follows them on their journey, wreaking bloody havoc all the way.
A pre-credits sequence shows the monkey doing its thing – mechanical hands beating a drum, a jaunty old tune emanating from its interior – culminating in a man’s viscera strung out across a room like Christmas streamers.
Every time the monkey’s mechanism cranks into life, which is quite often, nastiness of this sort happens. Perkins seems to get his jollies putting together bloody, disgusting and funny deaths.
The twins are not stupid. They work out something malevolent is going on and consign the furry machine to a well, but it comes back to plague good old Hal and bad old Bill as adults, played at this point by Theo James (Christian Convery is Hal/Bill as kids).
James does acting shock! Relying less on physique and looks than usual, James is good as the twin poles of masculinity, weak in different ways. Hal the Metrosexual Wimp and Bill the Manosphere Male.
Until his writer/director breakthrough, Perkins was best known as an actor. After a few near-misses, 2024’s Longlegs changed all that. Now he’s suddenly something of a horror auteur. Longlegs had acting ballast in Nicolas Cage, Maika Monroe and rising star Kiernan Shipka. Here there are moments of starry appeal from the likes of Tatiana Maslany, Adam Scott and Elijah Wood, but the bulk of the work is done by James and Convery. Both are very good as the twins, though Convery is so good I had to check several times it wasn’t different actors playing young Hal and Bill.
The monkey itself, meanwhile, you might recognise from Toy Story 3, though here it has a drum rather than cymbals (legal issues). It also “starred” in a long short called The Monkey in 2023.
Hokey and jokey, Perkins’s The Monkey continues his fascination, evident in Longlegs, with an older style of horror movie, the sort where glass domes abound, stuffed animals glare and clockwork toys jerk into action without being wound. Osgood is the son of Anthony Perkins, so there may be a reason why an older style of horror film has its own fascination, and it might explain the father/son angle too.
Honestly, I preferred Longlegs, possibly because I am fascinated with Maika Monroe’s acting, though there’s nothing bad going on here in that area. And possibly because Longlegs was more of a streamlined experience. Much as I like Adam Scott, I’m not sure the movie really needed him. Or, good though he is, does it need as much of Colin O’Brien, as Petey, in the estranged father/son storyline that slows things down a touch.
And while I’m being negative, there’s only so much macabre death even a devotee of this sort of thing can take before the cackle becomes the slightly fixed grin.
Does Osgood Perkins care what I think? I doubt it. He’s already got another movie, Keeper, on the way in the time it’s taken me to get around to watching The Monkey. Keeper stars Tatiana Maslany, who is in the “can do no wrong” category in my book. So let’s see what grimness he has lined up for her.
The Monkey – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
