The Monkey

This film is much more a dark comedy examining grief and the inevitability of death than it is a ‘horror movie’, but it’s another uniquely stylised film from writer/director Osgood Perkins that’s not quite like anything else out there.

Premise:  When teenage identical twins Hal and Bill inherit a wind-up musical toy monkey from their father, it appears to cause a series of bizarre deaths in their hometown.  Fearing the monkey’s supernatural power, the twins attempt to evade its curse – but years later the monkey re-enters the lives of the now-adult twins (Theo James).

Review:

Writer/director Osgood Perkins got a lot of attention for last year’s Longlegs, and so his follow up movie has been eagerly awaited.  However you felt about Longlegs (I admired its technical expertise and unrelentingly unsettling atmosphere, but I felt the plot was a let-down), I think it’s fair to say that The Monkey is intentionally a very different type of film in almost every respect.  Whereas Longlegs was genuinely unnerving throughout and was definitely a ‘horror’ film, The Monkey is essentially a very bleak black comedy – albeit a very bloody one.  As such, horror purists may find that The Monkey lacks the scares that they were hoping for, but at no point is this film even trying to be scary.  Gory?  Yes.  Shocking?  Yes.  Scary?  No.

The film does have a plot (which I won’t get into in detail here, in order to avoid spoilers), but it’s not really a plot-centric film.  Instead, it’s more focused on the central characters’ struggles to come to terms with their own mortality – in fact, the central theme of the film is neatly summed up in the line “Everybody dies. And that's life”.

“…funny, bleak, comforting, mournful & uplifting all at once…”

An extended monologue expanding on that premise is delivered by Tatiana Maslany (who plays the twins’ mother), and it’s somehow funny, bleak, comforting, mournful and uplifting all at once – and in many ways, that sums up the tone of the film itself.  Tatiana Maslany (who’s a criminally underrated actress) is fantastic in this role, giving the audience an idea of who Lois is as a person in her own right, even though the film only shows her through the eyes of her children.

The Monkey is based on a Stephen King short story, and although I haven’t read it, Osgood Perkins has been open about the fact that it’s a very loose adaptation.  Instead, it’s clear that Osgood Perkins has channelled a lot of his own personal trauma into this film – he's spoken publicly about how the tragic deaths of both of his parents affected him, and it feels that he’s poured a lot of his own experiences into this script, from asking ‘why is this happening to me?’, to the awkward platitudes offered after the death of a loved one.  And in many ways the whole film is about accepting with a smile the fact that “Everybody dies ... and that's life”.

“…first & foremost a dark comedy…”

Theo James doesn’t appear until partway through the film, playing the now-adult twins Hal and Bill (the teenage twins are played by Christian Convery) – and both Theo James and Christian Convery do a great job at instantly differentiating the two twins.  Hal is the narrator, and the more sensitive of the brothers, while Bill puts up a tougher exterior, and Theo James keeps the audience engaged during the middle act (which focuses on Hal’s difficult relationship with his own son, Petey, played by Colin O'Brien) even when the plot momentum sags a little.  Adam Scott and Elijah Wood both appear in fun cameos – the former in an opening sequence which sets the tone of the movie perfectly.

Despite the weighty themes which the film deals with, it really is first and foremost a dark comedy.  I laughed throughout, and the deaths caused by the monkey are all (with one exception) deliberately over-the-top and played for laughs.  It’s not a horror/thriller where the characters are attempting to evade or outwit death – instead it’s saying that the best way to deal with the inevitability of death is to smile, live your life, and remember to smell the roses when you can.  And for a film with this much blood, gore, intestines and viscera, that’s a lovely sentiment.