The Book of Revelation is a running motif throughout “The Monkey,” Osgood Perkins’ newest film based on a short story by Stephen King. Specifically, the film repeatedly references Revelation 6:8, which reads, in part, “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”
At its core, “The Monkey” is a film about death. It’s about wanton, ultra-violent, random death, but death all the same. The titular character — that is, the toy monkey behind all the carnage — is stored in a box with the words “Like Life” inscribed on it. It’s a pun, obviously, a play on the fact the monkey itself isn’t anything close to lifelike. But it’s also a warning: death happens to everyone, and the nature of it is something we have little control over.
All this makes “The Monkey” seem like an intensely serious film, but I assure you it’s not. Perkins ramps up the comedic aspects of “Longlegs,” his religious horror that just premiered last year, to their fullest potential here. “The Monkey” is, at its core, a pitch-black comedy that revels, and invites the audience to revel, in its intrinsic absurdity.
I use “absurd” here in a philosophical sense, to denote the film’s total irrationality and lack of any discernible meaning. There’s never any reason given for the violence and it’s never really resolved, even in the end. “The Monkey” asks that you just accept this is the way things are, and you have no choice, really, but to go along with it. I don’t want this to come across as a dig at the movie though— I love when filmmakers go all in with their concepts and have the utmost confidence in their vision. If “The Monkey” is anything, it’s wholly confident and completely earnest.
This is as good a time as any to explain what, exactly, this film is about. Perkin’s project follows the Shelburn family, the patriarch of whom, Petey (Adam Scott), is a deadbeat, absent father who leaves his boys, Hal and Bill (both played by Theo James), with a drum-playing toy monkey. Perhaps it isn’t fair to say he “leaves” it to them though, it might be more accurate to say that the monkey simply stayed. It seems to like killing the Shelburn family and their friends, and no matter what they do it just will not go away. After the monkey kills their mother, Hal and Bill almost get rid of it: but, 25 years later, when the majority of the film takes place, it’s back and angrier than ever.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that “The Monkey” is a very gory film, certainly not for the squeamish or the faint of heart. In fact, for better or worse, it’s this that makes up the bulk of the “horror” half of the “horror-comedy” signifier. I’d hesitate to call this film horrifying or even scary in any traditional sense, but I’m okay with that. I don’t think that’s exactly the sort of project it’s trying to be or the statement it’s trying to make. I was never expecting to leave the theater terrified that one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse would rise incarnate in the form of a toy monkey. But, in the end, I was properly disgusted by much of the movie’s imagery, and that’s just as fun.
That being said, the script does default to clichés time and time again. The film’s primary interpersonal conflict is between Hal and Bill, who are twins. But the kicker is that they hate each other and begin to resent each other even more for all the tragic deaths they experience together. Without going into spoilers, the story takes a predictable turn with this plotline, which is especially disappointing considering it seems to be entirely Perkins’ creation: I haven’t read King’s original 1980 story, but as far as I can tell Hal is the only character besides his son, Petey.
Perkins, as he is prone to do, hijacks this story to say something about intergenerational trauma, but that something isn’t really anything new or pertinent. There’s a whole subplot here between Hal and Petey that just never resolved in any particularly satisfying way: following in his own father’s footsteps, Hal chooses to not be in Petey’s life and, in turn, Petey’s stepfather, Ted (Elijah Wood), is looking to adopt him. You wouldn’t be blamed if you completely forget about this by the time the movie ends: Perkins dedicates a single scene, early in the second act, to this information and leaves it at that.
And look, I get it — it’s hard to write an engaging, relatable story for a mainstream audience that isn’t imbued with some sort of heart. And Perkins wasn’t necessarily wrong for attempting to do so. But I can’t help but feel that this is the type of film that would’ve benefited from the sort of detached, even cold style that a filmmaker like Yorgos Lanthimos has perfected with projects like “The Lobster” and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer.” I’m thinking, too, about Albert Camus, the philosopher behind the theory of absurdism, and his novel “The Stranger,” which is written in a similar matter-of-fact, even uncomfortably funny manner.
But I’m just spitballing my own ideas at this point. All things considered, I really enjoyed “The Monkey” and I had a blast watching it. I wish Perkins would learn from some of his mistakes — a lot of the problems here also plagued “Longlegs” –– but I do think, ultimately, he’s a very good horror director. I’m looking forward even more now to his next project, “Keeper,” set to be released in October. At the end of the day, if anything, I’m just relieved there’s at least one horror-comedy this year that hasn’t thoroughly aggravated me.
