Preamble

Believe it or not but this early screening of The Monkey has made me quite nostalgic. Despite aspiring for Film Critic status, I don’t get the opportunity to see many movies early. But on a Sunday evening in October 2010, I stumbled into an early screening of The Social Network. And from that point on, I had caught the film reviewing bug. At the time, I aspired to write for the University newspaper and my review of the 2010 film was my way to achieve that goal. Suffice to say, I had succeeded and the rest is history (as they say).

With the indulgent story out of the way, it’s incredible just how omnipresent The Monkey has felt. At the time of Longleg’s release, the teaser trailer played in front of many of my screenings. It’s incredible how much of a counter programming it has felt to Oz Perkins’s serial killer movie. With that said, do you plan to see The Monkey when it hits cinemas this Friday? Let me know in the comments below.

Brief Consideration

Last year, Oz Perkins catapulted to the mainstream with Longlegs. It was a chilly and tense serial killer thriller with supernatural undertones and a creepily manic Nicolas Cage performance. The power of understatement and exacting filmmaking was also effective in immersing and ultimately unnerving me.

Less than a year later, Perkins returns with an adaptation of Stephen King’s short story- The Monkey. The 2025 film is about twin brothers Hal and Bill (Theo James), who have to contend with the reemergence of an antique toy monkey that causes death whenever it bangs its drum.

On the page, King’s narrative is melancholic. It uses its Monkey Paw-inspired premise as a jumping-off point to explore fatherhood, loss of innocence in childhood and generational trauma. Intuitively, it seems like an adaptation that would be ripe for a Steven Spielberg or Frank Darabont. However, Perkins uses the novella to explore how parents try to connect with their kids and cope with tragedy. The former aspect manifests in the film’s sense of humour that comes from its savage and darkly comic candid remarks.

In The Monkey, parents rarely sugarcoat the harsh reality of the world to their kids. Instead, they dryly and sometimes quite bluntly state the truth about sobering topics. The best example comes after the funeral of a babysitter, where Hal and Bill’s Mum, Lois (Tatiana Maslany) expounds upon the nature of death and the many ways it can happen to an individual. Along with a quality of awkward riffing where certain characters trip over on their sentiments, results in humour that feels distinct and fun. This sense of candidness is juxtaposed with Hal’s choice of wanting to keep away from his son and hide the truth of his family from him.

Perkins also emphasizes the sibling relationship between Hal and Bill, whereby the latter becomes so fixated with the title object that he uses it as an obsessive means to kill his brother, who he blames for their mother’s death. This stretch of the film has the best drama, tension and filmmaking. In particular, Bill’s makeshift lair raises the cursed toy to almost deity level and the set design goes a long way to conveying this quality. The same goes for a medium shot of trees that are lit by police sirens that visually embodies the movie in one image, whereby the ordinary can be slightly slanted to become uncanny.