Review: The Monkey (2025)

There’s no accounting for taste. Keep this in mind as I share my thoughts about Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, a Stephen King adaptation about the ubiquity of death that tries for black comedy but is about as funny as seeing footage of an exploding head played on repeat. There’s one joke in The Monkey, and it’s not terrible, but it’s repeated ad nauseam until you realize there’s truly nothing novel here. Like the Deadpool films, the humour is juvenile, which isn’t an issue in itself, but does become exhausting and even insulting when wedded to sentimental hogwash masquerading as reflective commentary on childhood trauma.

The movie concerns a cursed toy monkey; whenever it plays its drums, someone ends up dead in a gruesome, tragic manner. In the opening sequence, Adam Scott’s pilot tries to give the monkey away to a pawnshop owner only for the monkey to play its drums and the pawnshop owner to promptly be disemboweled. The scene culminates in Adam Scott with a flamethrower screaming as he torches the monkey like he’s Rick Dalton roasting Nazis in The 14 Fists of McCluskey. The monkey passes to his twin sons, Hal and Bill (Christian Convery as children, Theo James as adults), and as the boys play with the monkey, awful things start happening to their family and the people around them.

The Monkey has the black humour of the Rick and Morty or Deadpool variety, where the humour seems to be predicated on the severity of the randomness and vulgarity. Apparently, there’s nothing funnier than someone dying in a gross way out of the blue, and so The Monkey plays this joke again, and again, and again. If it makes you laugh, who am I to argue with you? But you have to admit there’s no novelty here, just a vulgar gag played over and over, again and again.

The film’s tone is bizarrely off-kilter. It made me pine for the Final Destination movies (especially Final Destination 2) which are equally as enamoured of people dying in absurd ways, but are more creative in their Rube Goldberg-like setups and more delightfully arch with a clear movie sheen (even the bad ones). There’s a literal Rube Goldberg machine that explodes someone’s head in The Monkey and it’s not nearly as clever as anything in the Final Destination movies because it’s played so cynically.

Osgood Perkins is clearly talented. He knows how to frame a shot or set the mood in a scene. Too bad he seems to be a weak writer and to be a bit too enamoured of the hallmarks of elevated horror to calibrate to a more absurd concept like The Monkey. Despite the silliness of the material and the snarky tone of the film, the visual construction of The Monkey is too rigid. Most shots are centre-framed and use narrow depth of field to restrict our focus both within the frame and within the storytelling. It’s shadowy and dark and even when disgusting things happen on screen, overly controlled, with a precision that doesn’t match the messiness of the violence. You can tell this is the same man who made the thuddingly literal-minded Longlegs. The content and the performances on screen are absurd, bordering on camp, but the filmmaking is self-serious, leading to a tonal disparity between form and content. While the movie has the patina of prestige horror, it has the humour of a 15-year-old boy.

It also doesn’t help that the performers are all over the map. Theo James is a good enough actor and can be funny, as evidenced in season two of The White Lotus. But he’s not a fit for the adult Hal and especially not for the adult Bill. He’s playing two kinds of losers here, but he looks like a supermodel and carries himself like the most confident man in any room, so when he’s looking sad and desperate and weird on screen, it’s hard to believe him. The supporting performers don’t fare any better. Tatiana Maslany is the magic pixie dream mom while Colin O’Brien seems on an island as Hal’s mopey son, Petey. Poor Rohan Campbell, who is so good as Corey Cunningham in Halloween Ends, is left to play an unlikable, bewildering dope. Even Elijah Wood shows up for one inexplicable scene that feels like it belongs in an entirely different movie.

The thing that ultimately does The Monkey in for me is its late turn towards sentiment, as if Perkins and company cannot trust the arch tone they’re playing for and so have to try to make a profound statement about how death is unavoidable and childhood trauma will ultimately follow you like a curse. Stephen King’s storytelling is so engaged with the reality of death and trauma that I can understand the impulse to bring it back to something concrete and relatable, but it does seem a poor fit for a movie where a man gets turned into jelly by a stampede of wild horses or a woman impales herself on her “For Sale” sign after having her head lit on fire. As evidenced by the reviews or the reactions of the people I saw this with, clearly it works for some. But as I wrote at the outset, there’s no accounting for taste.

3 out of 10

The Monkey (2025, USA)

Directed by Osgood Perkins; written by Osgood Perkins based on a short story by Stephen King; starring Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell, Sarah Levy, Adam Scott, Elijah Wood.

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