Longlegs may have cemented Osgood Perkins’ stature in the horror community, but his twisted sensibility has been fully formed ever since his debut feature, The Blackcoat’s Daughter. In both of those films, as well as the two that came in between (Gretel & Hansel and I Am the Pretty Thing Whose Title Is Too Long), Perkins flaunted his gifts as a skilled purveyor of heebie-jeebies, wielding slick camerawork and atonal rhythms to keep viewers on edge and off balance. You might think that venturing into the realm of Stephen King would only elevate the director’s midnight-madness credentials, but The Monkey, which Perkins has adapted from a King short story, is his least scary movie thus far. There is, however, a reason for its relative lack of terror. Quite simply: It’s a comedy.
Specifically, The Monkey deploys countless variations of a single joke. It posits, not without cause, that the spectacle of watching human beings die on screen can be funny as well as tragic. This is undeniably in poor taste, which is part of what makes it amusing. Perkins, channeling his bloodletting instincts in a direction that’s silly rather than spooky, commits to his premise with innovative gusto. People don’t just die in this movie; they are shot, stabbed, dismembered, decapitated, electrocuted, immolated, trampled by horses, and engulfed by a swarm of bees. It’s your worst nightmare, unless you’re a coroner who loves your work.
The supernatural entity responsible for all of this spattery slaughter is the titular plaything—a wind-up toy with round eyes, an eerily wide smile, and a pair of oscillating drumsticks that tap onto the snare strapped to its waist. “You don’t want to be here when the arm comes down,” says a pilot (Adam Scott, in a fun cameo) to an inquisitive pawnbroker in the film’s prologue; his words prove prophetic, given that mere seconds later, a series of improbable events lead to a rusty harpoon eviscerating the other man’s stomach. This sequence instantly establishes the movie’s dementedly comic tone, which is reinforced by the subsequent image of the pilot howling maniacally as he torches the plastic beast with a flamethrower.
The mythology of The Monkey is not complicated: Whenever someone turns the key that activates its mechanical arms, someone else dies. It’s a premise typical of King’s fiction (Richard Kelly fans might recall The Box), and many of the author’s pet tics are on display: a dilapidated Maine setting (not Castle Rock), cruel children, and a decades-spanning narrative in which the sins and traumas of youth stalk the characters into adulthood. (King’s story was published in 1980; the action here putatively begins in 1999, perhaps to avoid the expense of creating two different past periods, though the early passages feel like they’re set in the ’70s.) Our hero is Hal (Christian Convery as an adolescent, then Theo James), a dorky 12-year-old—his spectacles immediately inform you of his weakness—who’s bullied by his classmates, including his twin brother, Bill. After uncovering the toy in a dusty closet, they do what kids do and play with it, resulting in a succession of inexplicable deaths, including that of their mother, Lois (Tatiana Maslany).
It’s possible to imagine a version of The Monkey that wrestles with the caprices of fate and the scars of childhood—how the random events and innocent follies of our formative years can shape (and maybe warp) the remainder of our lives. Yet Perkins, in what’s either a bold gambit or a fatal display of sadism, exhibits a brazen indifference to exploring the picture’s themes or emotions. Instead, he is primarily invested in conjuring various, increasingly elaborate methods of human expiration. Following the architecture of the Final Destination franchise (but with jokes instead of jolts), Perkins has essentially traded anticipation for gratification: If his prior movies were memorable for the way they summoned dread—the anxiety that something bad was going to happen—here he has eagerly fast-forwarded to the bloody outcome.
Taken on their own terms, the grisly kill sequences of The Monkey are competent and vaguely impressive. They don’t inculcate fear, but they do cultivate an expectant logic in which viewers prime themselves for the inevitable carnage; scenes of a hibachi chef swinging his blades or an insect colony buzzing with anger cause us to lead forward with perverse curiosity. But the scheme is awfully repetitive, and despite Perkins’ brutal ingenuity, he struggles to infuse the proceedings with any lasting energy or suspense.
That’s a problem, because Perkins hasn’t bothered to surround his medley of mayhem with an interesting story or meaningful characters. Hal’s adolescent anguish is standard-issue, while as an adult he’s sloppily written. The casting of James doesn’t help, because despite the actor’s best (maybe second-best) efforts, he’s simply too attractive to be credible as an ineffectual nebbish; saddling this hunk with glasses and a bad haircut doesn’t make him dorky. The script contrives a ghastly father-son subplot in which Hal mentors his previously neglected offspring (Colin O’Brien), with dialogue that’s less recognizably awkward than just stiff and clichéd. This thread also incorporates a bizarrely awful appearance from Elijah Wood in a scene that’s so airless, you wonder if it was included just to help nudge the runtime above 90 minutes.
The lone figure who doesn’t feel like a cardboard cutout is Lois, whose plucky effervescence carries the hint of a genuine personality. That’s partly thanks to Maslany, who’s capable of imbuing stock roles with whispers of a bustling inner life. But Perkins at least treats the character as a human rather than a victim; it’s notable that her demise is the only one which isn’t played for laughs.
It’s still a plot point, though, as well as a loss that neither Hal nor the movie ever recovers from. In essence, The Monkey operates as a mirror image of last month’s Heart Eyes, Josh Ruben’s rom-com-cum-slasher that featured two charming leads whose winning chemistry was spliced into a by-numbers horror plot with dreadfully orchestrated set pieces. Perhaps a more artistically inclined monkey could have used its paranormal powers to combine the best parts of each picture when you turned its key, yielding something that provided white-knuckle tension yet also hummed with warm, colorful life. But death is Perkins’ stock in trade, and while he’s good at killing his characters, his failure to develop them throws a you-know-what in the works.
Grade: C+
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.