I suppose this is a smart pivot after your big breakout. After Osgood Perkins burst onto the directing scene with 2024’s creepy Longlegs, the horror community was ready to crown a new horror King, especially since The Monkey is a Stephen King short story. Sorry to say, this is a sophomore slump situation for Perkins, who isn’t to blame with his direction per se, but with other choices surrounding the movie he isn’t as lucky with this time around.
Like all Stephen King stories, twins Hal and Bill Shelburn (Christian Convery, older played by Theo James) grow up in a pretty unhappy household. Their mother Lois (Tatiana Maslany) means well, but is extremely hurt being ghosted by her ex husband, now deeply cynical and passing that onto her kids. This attitude doesn’t forge the twins bond, but fissures a shaky one completely, as Bill (3 minutes older) bullies Hal relentlessly. Desperate for any connection to their dad, the twins stumble upon his artifacts from his travels (dad was a pilot), including a very strange monkey toy, that has a twist key with the inviting ominous message “See what happens!”
Perkins’s timing is great, as we’re in a two month moment of horror comedies that he conveniently slots The Monkey into. The opening makes it clear what type of movie we’re gonna watch: an over the top gross winking Final Destination. This tone gives Perkins carte blanche to go crazy with the “accidents” that kill most of his cast. The kills are gnarly and gross…and almost always very funny, going with the kill behind the obvious kill each time or ignoring the laws of nature and physics to engage in a twisted thought experiment. And some of the cast is ready and able to support the eewey gooey with the right darkly nihilistic sense of humor. Tatiana Maslany and Elijah Wood know what film they’re in, and try to equal that monkey’s innate creepiness and weirdness with their own, giving the movie a nice jolt of cruel electricity. Even Perkins himself has a lot of fun with his 5 minute part, though he probably wanted it anyways cause his death is the most sick.
But dark nihilism only works for so long. At some point you need your main character to hold the movie together or else we just want them dead too. Apologies to Theo James, who is hunky and I hear very good in White Lotus. But he’s out of his realm here like he was in Divergent, probably too hung up on making the twins behave differently to pay too much attention to what he needs to bring to the story. Plus, James was innately screwed from Shyamalan syndrome, where no person talks like anyone resembling a human being. So when you’re in bit parts like Maslany and Wood, that’s fine, but when you’re Theo James, Colin O’Brien, or Rohan Campbell, and have to give the movie some sort of emotional heft, the dialogue feels even worse cause it’s trying to ground a story that shouldn’t be, instead having the audience root for even gnarlier, grosser deaths for them instead of sympathizing with the clearly traumatized leads.
But hey, they can’t all be winners. Many directors recover from sophomore slumps, and I’m very certain Perkins will. He’s got the family and juice, and I look forward to wherever his career goes from here. Just leave Theo James in Thailand, where he belongs, in some sort of rich hunky murder mystery.