Review | ‘The Monkey’ is a gruesomely hilarious riot

Photo Collage by Braylan Enscoe, Staff Photographer

Spoiler alert: This article contains mild spoilers for “The Monkey.”

I walked into “The Monkey” scared out of my mind. It was a strange feeling — I love horror movies, I’m not particularly squeamish about on-screen blood and gore and I wasn’t going alone. Despite this, that monkey and its beady, soul-piercing eyes got under my skin. I knew I was about to watch some disturbed mayhem unfold on screen. I instinctively hid my eyes behind my hands as the theater darkened and the movie began.

From the director of the 2024 horror darling “Longlegs,” Osgood Perkins’ “The Monkey” is a movie that’s great at getting under your skin. If you’re at all familiar with the source material — a short story by the king of horror fiction Stephen King — or the movie’s murderous premise, you’ll walk into the theater with a sense of overwhelming dread. The premise is simple. The titular supernatural wind-up monkey toy is not a toy at all. It is pure evil. When you wind it up, it beats its drum. When the song ends, someone dies randomly and horrifically. Every time the monkey is on the screen, the tension skyrockets, knowing someone, somehow, is about to kick the bucket.

But that thing I said about “The Monkey” getting under your skin is true… only for a few minutes.

Perkins spends so much time setting up elaborate Rube Goldberg death machines, props laid out that you just know will lead to someone’s grisly demise. You expect something gnarly, something bone-crushingly, spine-shatteringly, nerve-twistingly gruesome and unholy… which you get, sure, but you don’t expect it to be as funny as it is.

“The Monkey” is a hoot and a half. Any fears I had about not being able to stomach its twisted, murderous tendencies were assuaged with its first completely over-the-top nonsensical death, presented with such deadpan that you can’t help but burst out laughing. It’s less “Final Destination” and more “Looney Tunes.”

Don’t get me wrong, it still has its foot planted firmly in the horror genre — that mounting suspense before death strikes remains effective for the entire 100-minute runtime — but it’s also a full-fledged comedy. 

And as is paramount to a successful comedy or horror movie (or both, in this case) are its performances. Theo James of “Divergent” fame gives a career-turn of a double performance, playing twins Hal and Bill Shelburn whose family is cursed with owning the wind-up killer simian whether they like it or not. It’s Christian Convery who really shines though, playing the same twins as children with so much panache that I admittedly thought it was two real twins. Both actors play both twins with sheepishness and malevolence to a gleeful degree, lighting up their scenes with a hateful sibling dynamic that pulls the entire film together. They’re so much fun to watch, elevating an admittedly silly premise to some (often darkly) absurd heights.

I would take the opportunity to delve into the story of “The Monkey” and the dynamics of its twin protagonists, but it’s by far the film’s most undercooked aspect. It’s a movie that does exactly what it tells you it will: make you squirm, kill people and make you laugh while it happens. There’s a throughline about paternal abandonment and grief, but it’s so surface level that it feels more like parody than anything earnest.

The film is deeply stupid, with everyone vying for control of the monkey with motivations that are half-baked at best, and the majority of character conflicts could probably be resolved through simple conversation. Don’t go into “The Monkey” expecting anything dramatically interesting. Perkins puts his full attention on concocting ridiculous deaths, not intricate character tension.

And boy, those deaths are wild. You will watch people get skewered, trampled, burnt, decapitated, crushed, hooked, exploded, torn and any number of other grisly verbs. It’s not a film for the squeamish, but every death is so over-the-top and tongue in cheek that you’ll be smiling through the sadism. Death is an inevitable part of life, so Osgood Perkins decides to have fun getting there.