The Monkey Shines!

Osgood Perkins strikes again and between this and Heart Eyes, 2025 has two hilarious, if grim and gory, horror hybrids. Heart Eyes is certainly a rom-com/horror hybrid; The Monkey is very much a family comedy/horror hybrid.The former plays more with upending genre tropes while the latter is rooted, form the get-go, in a family haunted by a specific trauma and this tends to lend The Monkey a little weight, if not gravitas.  

By centering the tale around a fraught family dynamic between twin brothers that grows increasingly toxic with the machinations of a malevolent,  death-dealing mechanical toy (for the love of God, don’t call it a toy!!!) monkey that bangs a drum and on the last downward strike, someone dies. Fun and games, right?

Actually, it kind of very much is. With an introduction that involves Adam Scott attempting to offload said monkey on an unsuspecting pawn shop owner that results in said pawn shop owner’s demise in an unforeseen manner, you know you’re in for a ride. That the ride only gets bumpier is a given, particularly when the bickering twins Hal and Bill arrive on the screen. 

Played by Christian Convey in their younger years and Theo James as adults, Hal is the more studious, humble and forgotten kid. Bill is a shit. Not quite “bad seed” or full-on Damien by a long shot; but he is definitely a bullying shit. Both actors do remarkable work in their characterizations but also, playing against one another in the same scene. Tatiana Maslany is their mother Lois, and once again, just glows. She’s there for her boys, but Bill soaks up more attention than Hal and it is Hal who has discovered the Monkey’s homicidal abilities.  Unfortunately, when he decides to weaponize those abilities to dispatch his shit twin, he winds up executing their mother.

Prior to that, Monkey had decapitated the baby-sitter that Bill had a crush on and said he was going to marry. Nothing like losing your head at a hibachi restaurant. All of the deceased meet unusual ends. Their aunt died, for instance, after going to her basement (she could faintly hear the Monkey’s wind-up music). First a step collapses under her feet and she falls into a box with fish-hooks owned by her late husband. We cut to her removing hook by hook and sterilizing the perforations with rubbing alcohol which lights her face on fire when she leans over a gas burner because she smells a leak. Panicking, she runs out the front door and into arrow on the realtor’s sign on the front lawn, plunging it into her right eye socket and into her skull. 

To go into each death would fill this out way more than necessary and deprive you of too much fun.

You know what isn’t fun? Having your life reduced to avoiding relationships with your wife and your son. Not being able to make any connection for fear of causing someone you love’s death. And how do you explain that to people? Like your son whom you love but only see once a year and who you are going to lose to your ex-wife and her current husband (Laura Mennell playing it so straight and Elijah Wood turning in smarm like I’ve not seen anyone do in a while….oh, wait, no. sorry, outside of Elon Musk, then. 

A brief timeline might be useful here. Their dad, played by Adam Scott, disappeared after disposing of the Monkey and after Lois’s death, they were left in care of Aunt Ida, who died as described above (after her husband Chip had been killed by a freak horse herd stampede). They thought they’d gotten rid of the Monkey but it continued to return. We see it melting in the pawn shop that Scott as the twin’s dad set fire to, Hal had dismembered it, but it came back when they moved in with Chip and Ida. The twins buried the - I’ve got to remember to not call it a toy - Monkey and thought that would be it, but then Ida dies twenty-five years later. 

By this time, the brothers were fully estranged. Bill bullied Hal relentlessly to the point where, before the Monkey entered their lives, Hal fantasized about dropping a bowling ball on Bill while the latter slept. There’s a call-back later in the film to this and it is, frankly, glorious.

Bill calls Hal while Hal is spending one last week with Petey, his son. Petey is played by Colin O’Brien who brings an intelligence and vulnerability to the role similar to a young Jesse Eisenberg. He grows increasingly impatient with his dad for Hal’s tight-lipped responses and repeated attempts to keep Petey away from the truth of the family’s heritage. He lies to Petey about having a brother and O’Brien’s voiced response when he learns - from a cop talking to Hal - that he does indeed have an uncle, is underplayed just the right amount. 

The people on the periphery of this toxicity are all to a one, either well-meaning or just clueless. Ida and Chip were kind of idiots but didn’t really deserve their fates and surely, others as well are mostly collateral damage, but this is in large measure owing to the sub-text of the narrative, which comes ultimately from a short story by Stephen King. We are on King’s thematic terra firma of family tragedy, abuse, and trauma and how it affects those in the orbit of those elements. 

I don’t know if King’s short story is as redolent with slapstick as the film, but what does land is Hal’s attempts to protect Petey from what we can only call by this point, the family curse. Of course, by not discussing it, by trying to hide the cause of the disfunction, it only destroys the relationship. That would be heartrending enough in a straight up non-horror context, but in a horror film, the metaphors often amplify that sadness and render the pain of fissures in relationships more visceral. In film like this with Grand Guignol terminations delivered in very often Loony Toons fashion, the trauma is tamped down by the cartoonishness, but it’s not far enough away to not cause us to pause and consider that subtext, even if it’s after the fact.

In fact, it’s often on post facto retrospect, that we come to really appreciate the brilliance of a good script. And Perkins has delivered a very good script here.

When we meet Bill twenty-five years later, we discover that he’s been waiting for the Monkey to return. He’s also certain he knows how to use it against Hal, whom he blames for their mother’s death. When Bill berates Hal for killing their mother, Hal mentions she was his mother, too. Until that moment, it had never occurred to Bill that was the case. We glean pretty clearly that Bill had never considered Hal a person, let alone his brother, and for a moment or two, there’s a sense that there might be a rapprochement but by that point, Bill had already endangered Petey and by forcing the Monkey to drum without using the key, brings down death and devastation to the whole town. 

Bill’s fate is sealed and it does involve a bowling ball, but the heart to heart Hal and Petey have leaving the town amid death and destruction (the sight gags are horrifically funny) is so well-played. When Petey asks what they’re going to do with the Monkey, Hal says it’s just going to have to stay with them.

This comes so soon after Longlegs (which may be his best work so far) where Perkins has shown what he can do and it is impressive. He’s been knocking it out of the park since I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. 

I could see where this may not be to eveybody’s taste; but how we approach dysfunctional relationships along with the attendant suppression of emotions and histories, doesn’t always have to be handled melodramatically and as I mentioned above, often we can come to learn more about these issues when refracted through genres that may not necessarily be “appropriate” for the topic.

I’ve already droned on elsewhere about “elevated horror” and how I am rarely caught up in a film enough to be frightened by a horror movie; but I’ll reiterate here that what I do respond to is how well deeper themes are handled and the overall craft and execution of any given horror film. 

In this case, I’m really pleased by the use of humor, subtle and slapstick, and the genuine pathos in other moments, that Perkins balances so ably. I think I’ve just talked myself into a rewatch.