Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey is a movie with a lot on its mind—too much, maybe. So much that it all goes to “cherry pie” much like good old Uncle Chip. Of anyone in the world, I imagine I was the target audience: Final Destination 3 is one of my favorite movies of all time, I was a staunch Longlegs defender last year, and in my opinion, the best play ever written is Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I also love to pretentiously drop the word “Sisyphean” in conversation.
The Monkey gestures at all of those: gruesome deaths brought about by the cruel and impartial hand of fate, existential absurdity, the male loneliness epidemic, and possibly a crude sort of AIDS metaphor. But that is all it does: gesture, or remind you of better art that you could be watching or reading or thinking about.
So far, I am aware that I sound quite negative, but I didn’t necessarily have a bad time at this movie. I laughed at some of the jokes, and some of the deaths were pretty gnarly. It was perfectly entertaining but a let down that just feels like it gets worse and worse the longer I think about what could have been: all of my favorite things in the world but not done with an odd and sort of self-interested sense of humor.
The basic premise follows two twins, Hal and Bill (both played as adults by Theo James), who, as children, found a cursed, drum-beating monkey toy in their father’s closet (literally) that kills indiscriminately whenever it plays its little song. After destroying both of their lives, Hal and Bill escape the monkey, but not for long. Years later, Hal is an emotionally closed-off man, too afraid of his loved ones dying at random for the crime of being associated with him to form any meaningful relationships. As the trailer so eloquently states, “the monkey that likes killing [his] family” comes back, forcing him to connect with both his son, Petey (Colin O’Brien), and his estranged brother.
Hal and Bill are pretty spot on with the typical theatre of the absurd pair of characters a la Rosencrantz and Guildenstern or Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: Bill is more connected with base urges of survival, anger, revenge, and lust while still being remarkably ineffective at accomplishing his goals (e.g., Rosencrantz, Estragon), and Hal is more prone to musings and overthinking to the point of essentially being incompatible with life (e.g., Guildenstern, Vladimir).
Both characters are existential failures—meaning they perpetually play the role of the victim, blaming everything but their own choices for the way their lives turned out—but in different ways. Hal is a recluse along the lines of Alex or Clear from Final Destination, an existential failure in its most literal form: refusing to leave the house or connect with others out of fear of death. Bill, on the other hand, becomes addicted to playing God, constantly winding up the monkey in the hopes of killing the people who he believes ruined his life.
It’s a super interesting set up, especially for someone like me, who loves every piece of media I just discussed above, but The Monkey never commits to saying anything about it. Where, after Longlegs, I would find more and more as I further unraveled it, here, poking into this movie is like poking a balloon. It all blows up, and you realize there was never anything there but hot air.
The Monkey is a horror comedy, but I didn’t find much entertainment in either the horror or the comedy. It prides itself on the Final Destination comparisons, and they are apt, especially toward the beginning, but soon, the deaths lose all ounce of creativity. The opening scene is wacky and surreal, a tone I was hoping would be kept up throughout the rest of the movie, but it’s only downhill from there; eventually, you’ll realize that half of the deaths are just people blowing up in explosions of CGI blood. Final Destination thrives on the inevitable dread of death and the desperate, futile struggle against fate, so while it’s silly, it’s also genuinely thrilling to watch, and it has some of the most disgusting death scenes ever put to screen.
The Monkey makes me think that Perkins saw Final Destination and didn’t see what I always thought was the most impressive part of it all: the build-up so excessive it becomes funny. The “how did someone possibly come up with this?” that inevitably goes through your mind while watching. The Monkey is a detached spectacle at its most lonely.
Final Destination at least understands that, while you inevitably can’t have incredibly well-developed relationships between all those people who are going to die in insane ways, you can at least make your main characters interesting. The central relationship here is between Hal and Petey, his son who he essentially abandoned, but their dynamic changes on a dime. They both experience random and sporadic character development that amounts to the most unsatisfying ending of the year. Since the stakes are always so high (yet simultaneously so low since we know the three characters who have some semblance of a personality are safe at least until the end of the third act), the climax and these huge character-defining moments don’t feel as big—the world never ends, and, despite the nature of the movie, none of the main characters ever truly feel at risk—so really, who cares?
It’s impossible to separate The Monkey from Perkins’ history, and this is very intentional; both of his parents died tragically and suddenly. His father, Anthony Perkins, died of AIDS-related complications, and his mother, Berry Berenson, was on one of the planes that crashed during 9/11. There’s even a 9/11 joke in the movie, in case you didn’t already know that about him. That kind of self-referential morbidity is certainly a look into Perkins’ psyche: his obsession with fate, death, and repression all tying back to his family history.
A key pattern in the deaths in this movie is that they overwhelmingly target women who are sexually active or desirable to the male characters: the babysitter Bill had a crush on gets decapitated at hibachi, the woman in the bikini at the motel pool explodes, and the real estate agent flirting with Hal spontaneously combusts (explodes, again). Even those who aren’t literally desirable figures to the brothers still are connected with sex: their aunt and uncle are swingers, and cheerleaders are definitely the most objectified athletes out there, often depicted as nothing more than figures of a main male character’s desire, especially in older movies that seem to have inspired this one.
There’s this strange fixation that permeates this movie and Longlegs about sex as sin/death and fathers with deadly secrets that kill their wives and children. These details make The Monkey feel not just thematically confused (the only two factors breaking this formula being the death of the boys’ mother and the lack of death of Petey’s mother), but uncomfortably regressive. Perkins seems to be working through his own complicated feelings about his father’s sexuality in a way that reads as vaguely homophobic: being the gay parent is an inherent betrayal of one’s family (hence the death of Hal and Bill’s mother), and if we don’t laugh at people suddenly dying at random due to “misplaced” sexual desire (specifically sexual desire that doesn’t lead to the birth of a child, hence the survival of Petey’s mother), then we can’t live. It reminds me of people who go online and say that their “trauma made them funny”.
Don’t worry: the movie is also disappointing from a technical standpoint. Perkins has definitely found a niche with surreal, stylized horror like that in The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Longlegs (where it is certainly at its best), but here, his usual aesthetic is flattened by over reliance on shock humor. Where the cinematography in Longlegs contributed to the building of tension—peeking over shoulders or lagging slightly behind the protagonist—it feels almost out of place in The Monkey, where there is no sense of dread to be found. For a movie so preoccupied by the weight of death, not one single kill is anything beyond that: a kill. The gore is excessive and meaningless. It’s all gross and silly because if you’re not laughing, Perkins doesn’t have anything left to offer you.
Due to the lack of emotional resonance, Theo James in the dual lead role is serviceable but unmemorable. The movie is so surreal and absurdist that it feels completely untethered to reality. Where the plain horror of Longlegs grounded the magic or the mundane repetition of the coin flip in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead plants you firmly in the moment through the simple feeling of the passage of time, The Monkey floats off wherever the wind blows. The inability to let go of its forced humor prevents any real character depth for anyone involved.
When the movie finally lands on its closing statement, which is essentially another version of “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” (from Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, a story that has stuck with me for the better part of my life), it feels cheap and half-baked, perhaps because we were never burdened with pushing any sort of metaphorical boulder up any sort of metaphorical hill. It never weighed anything, so there’s no catharsis when it’s gone.
The Monkey lets its own ideas float away, overstuffed and overconfident in its humor. It wants to be an existential statement, a horror comedy, a Final Destination homage, a commentary on fate, repression, generational trauma, having a gay dad, or even the alt-right pipeline (if you squint hard enough), but there’s no glue to stick it all together. If you want fate and existential horror and crazy deaths, just wait for the Final Destination: Bloodlines to come out in May. If you love the idea of caricatures of men comedically dealing with existential absurdity, pull out a copy of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (or watch it on streaming as there is a movie adaptation). If you like Osgood Perkins, just rewatch Longlegs or wait for Keeper in October. There’s nothing to be found here that isn’t done better elsewhere.
None of this is to say that you’ll have the worst time, but make sure you go with a group of friends who will make you laugh no matter what’s on the screen. Maybe then watching it will feel less like pushing a perfectly round boulder and trying to get it to stay on top of a perfectly round hill top. Or flipping a coin hundreds of times for it to only ever land on heads. But if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome, I can’t let you walk into The Monkey thinking you’ll get anything but exactly the same thing you’ve seen a million times over.
★★★☆☆
5 out of 10
Check out The Monkey in theaters.
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