The Monkey (2025) A morbid, laugh-through-the-pain psycho-comedy 

There is no one else in the business making movies as a substitute for therapy quite like Osgood Perkins. While he delighted summer audiences with a dark trip into serial killer mayhem with last year’s most profitable independent movie (Longlegs), it was importantly wrapped up in personal issues and concerns with his paternal lineage; Osgood’s father was the late, great Anthony Perkins, arguably the man responsible for making horror villains a respectable pursuit for any actor. His mother, model Berry Berenson, is perhaps a less talked-about figure, yet one central to the thesis of his new film, The Monkey, a beefed-up adaptation of a Stephen King short story about a cursed mechanical monkey that causes random death and destruction every time someone winds it up. The film’s NSFW tagline (“Everybody dies. And that’s fucked up.”) very much feeds into the cruel fate of Osgood’s mother, who was a victim of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre, having been one of the ill-fated passengers of American Airlines Flight 11. Add to that losing his father to AIDS-related causes nine years prior, it’s perhaps fitting that his film about the cosmic unfairness of absurd death comes in the form of a barmy horror-comedy marketed on its kills and deadpan brutality. But, against all odds and good taste, does the exorcism of this particular trauma make for an amusing watch?

Through the frame of a bitter sibling rivalry, just about! Theo James narrates and later stars as twin brothers Hal and Bill (played in the opening act by child actor Christian Convery), whose childhood is derailed by the seemingly innocuous discovery of their absent father’s (Adam Scott) eponymous wind-up toy. Babysitters and family members are felled in splattertastic by its inexplicable evil, leading weedy hero boy Hal to dismember it and toss it down a well for all eternity. But when it suddenly turns back up at their auntie’s house twenty five years later, the cycle of carnage begins again, just when Hal is going through a relationship-making-or-breaking week away with his estranged son Petey (Colin O’Brien). The sins of the father trickle down from son to son as the grinning simian’s path of destruction gets less and less personal, and it’s only a matter of time before the Final Destination-style antics reach all the way across the Stephen King state of Maine. 

Despite the extensive backstory outlined by the film’s substantial opening act, there’s not an awful lot stringing together the eyewatering murder set-pieces that make up The Monkey. And that is totally fine; anyone in attendance for this Rube Goldberg organ grinder should expect little else from Perkins letting his hair down and laughing at roadkill, and watching him bring to life a weighty notebook of horrific deaths is often a sight to behold. One stampede of horses reduces a man to looking like “if you dropkicked a cherry pie”; a pawnshop owner has an unfortunate run-in with his cache of antique weapons; an elderly woman trying to enjoy her beauty sleep falls foul of fish hooks, a gas leak and a postbox when woken by the eerie tones of a fun fair rendition of “I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside”: all of these are delivered with Perkins’ signature formal polish, but with a giggling childishness that we haven’t seen from him before. This sophomoric sense of humour can become an irritant in places, but the longer it goes along, the more numbing each slapstick demise becomes, it somehow becomes funnier and funnier. A misplaced rake during a third-act kill is the cherry-on-top as a lethal implement that has no reason to be where it is, yet the ensuing destruction is too silly to resist. 

Theo James is an able tuning fork for this material, with his chiselled jaw and seductive dark eyes belying his characters’ twisted sides to great effects. This Next Bond-contender may seem an initially odd choice to play a socially-anxious sadsack, yet he adds an off-key strangeness to Hal and especially Bill, whose acidic relationship forms the bitter heart of this nasty little film. Faring even better is Christian Convery as the brothers when they’re boys, who is versatile enough to convince you he actually is two different people, Hal’s aghast nerviness rubbing up brilliantly against Bill’s obnoxious abusive bully. There’s cameos abound of horror-adjacent and comedy faces alike (at least two are too good to spoil), but special mention must also go to Tatiana Maslany as the brothers’ world-weary mother, whose removed ‘it-is-what-it-is’ outlook on life is a great foil to the terrible fates that await every character once that damned monkey starts to bang its drum.

Perkins is once again a clumsy writer in terms of structure, repeating the mistake of Longlegs in blustering into its third act with an expository flashback monologue that underlines an obvious reveal to the point of oblivion; he just loves a thorough set-up followed by an unintutive resolution that puffs and pants its way to the finish line. It’s just easier to forgive this time, with the picaresque carnival of chaos surrounding Hal proving to be an amusingly ramshackle hurtle towards total annihilation, instead of Longlegs’ limp end to an otherwise atmospheric descent into hell. 

In the press tour and marketing for The Monkey, the glint in Perkins’ eye once again lets us know we have little to fear from him. The baggage he has carried into each of his recent films has felt quite alarming, yet he’s unpacked it in unexpectedly fun and wacky ways. While Longlegs felt like a specific itch he had to scratch on the emotional scars left by his parents, The Monkey is a mordant, morbid laugh-through-the-pain psycho-comedy that feels as cathartic as it does sickly and ill-advised. Despite being best seen with a popcorn-fuelled evening crowd to hoot and holler with, Perkins’ branch-out towards belly laughs proves to be as interesting to unpick as his more self-consciously serious work.

Simon’s Archive – The Monkey (2025)