The Monkey

That vaguely nihilistic worldview comes to us via a character who, like most others in Osgood Perkins’ gleefully gory horror-comedy, isn’t long for this world. She has the misfortune of existing in the same general vicinity as the eponymous mechanical primate, as do twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn (played by Theo James as adults and Christian Convery as children), who inherited the cymbal-crashing monkey from their absentee father. “I don’t know if every father places some secret horror on his kid,” narrates the adult Hal early on, “but mine sure did.” As heirlooms go, this one proves considerably more traumatic than a stamp collection.

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The Monkey arrives in theaters a mere seven months after Longlegs, also written and directed by Osgood Perkins. Quality hasn’t much declined with quantity, a trend that will hopefully continue when he and distributor Neon make it a trifecta with this fall's Keeper. Let’s also hope that that film takes things more seriously than this one does.

As you can probably guess from the movie’s very existence, the organ grinder itself — don’t ever call it a toy — is evil and/or cursed, but anyone hoping for an explanation as to why will have to wait for the inevitable Monkey: Origins prequel. We learn nothing about how it came to be, which is probably for the best. These are lore-heavy times, and bucking that trend is a point in the movie’s favor. What we do learn is that turning the key in its back results in someone dying in a gruesome “accident” shortly after it crashes its cymbals together and the only one safe from its machinations is whoever turns said key. Some of these exits are Final Destination-like in their elaborate contrivance, while others are so sudden that victim and viewer alike never see them coming.

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Though it’s adapted from a Stephen King story, The Monkey feels more like a feature-length adaptation of a Treehouse of Horror segment from The Simpsons — mostly in a good way. There’s an inherent silliness to the affair that Perkins is more than happy to lean into, which has the effect of making his film both entertaining and low-stakes. If he isn’t interested in treating his characters as anything more than means to a bloody end, why should we be?

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If anyone gets a pass for depicting generational trauma this bluntly, it’s Osgood Perkins. The actor-turned-filmmaker’s father was Anthony Perkins, better known as Psycho’s Norman Bates, who died of AIDS when Oz was 18; his mother, the actress and model Berry Berenson, was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11 when it crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The younger Perkins hasn’t been shy about this autobiographical connection: “The thing with this toy monkey is that the people around it all die in insane ways,” he told Empire Magazine last month. “So, I thought: ‘Well, I’m an expert on that. Both my parents died in insane, headline-making ways.’” When life gives you lemons…

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We learn nothing about how it came to be, which is probably for the best.

Whether or not it’s true that laughter is the best medicine, there’s no denying that Perkins has prescribed a healthy dose of gallows humor for himself and his audience. Death is as constant as it is inevitable in The Monkey, not to mention as violent as possible: Heads are lopped off, torsos are impaled, and characters you were starting to warm to are disposed of like cannon fodder. Why, then, doesn’t Hal simply destroy the thing? Because it’s indestructible, of course — it can even teleport after being tossed to the bottom of a well.

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Despite the monkey’s latent creepiness, the film is heavy on comedy and light on horror. There’s a difference between gory and scary, and Perkins, whose ability to unnerve viewers is beyond reproach after Longlegs, isn’t unwise in focusing almost entirely on the former half of the equation. It’s as though he got all the seriousness out of his system with his last movie and wanted to flex a different set of creative muscles. The Monkey is a successful enough experiment, but by the time it’s over you might find yourself wishing that it’s also a one-off. We’ve seen what happens when you turn the key. Now let’s see what happens when Perkins once again shows us something really scary.