“Everybody dies. And that’s life” says a mother consoling her two kids in the middle of a graveyard, right after attending the funeral of their babysitter who died in a freak decapitated-in-a-Benihana accident.
It is a line that sums up best of what “The Monkey” is going for. It’s so simple that it carries a resounding truth: everyone dies, making death an inevitable factor of life. Yet, it is also so simple that it leaves more to be desired — the need for something to add on to this morbid idea where death is all that life is about. But writer-director Osgood Perkins seemingly doesn’t care, presumably sharing the same glib smile as Lois (Tatiana Maslany) when she delivers the line with mock sincerity.
This is the energy that “The Monkey” rides on, a departure from Perkins’ more grim films like “Longlegs” and “The Blackcoat’s Daughter.” Instead of a movie involving Satanism, a looming sense of dread and moody atmosphere, “The Monkey” is about a toy monkey that kills people via violent, “Final Destination”- style deaths.
Besides the sillier tone, it updates the general premise of the Stephen King short story it’s based on. The first half of the film takes place in 1999 where the unfortunate owners, tween twins Hal and Bill (both played by Christian Convery), find the cursed toy in a closet full of their deadbeat father’s things. After making the connection between the toy and several brutal deaths of their loved ones, they manage to get rid of it despite its uncanny ability to come back unscathed. Twenty-five years later, the now-estranged brothers (Theo James) have to deal with the monkey’s sudden return. Of course, this return is punctuated with their aunt (Sarah Levy) getting her head lit on fire from a gas stove.
The film’s humor mainly comes from this, with Perkins doing whatever he can to make the deaths as absurd as possible. If a person is electrocuted, they simply explode. A person who gets trampled to death is shown as nothing more than a sleeping bag full of bone and goo. There is never a realistic death; the closest one is a brain aneurysm, which later returns as a gory fake-out dream sequence.
“The Monkey”’s passé attitude towards death both elevates and retracts. The deaths are funny thanks to the film’s passivity and excessive nature, but never creates a deeper statement than “And that’s life.” However, it does fit with Hal and Bill’s trauma of their experience with the toy, communicating an emotional stunting that goes far into their adulthoods. The issue is that the film doesn’t build on the material in a meaningful way. These thoughts may seem too serious for a comedy about a killer monkey toy, but this flaw becomes apparent when, in the end, Perkins does try to create weight.
He tries to create an emotional center through the brother’s relationship and their experience with death. Hal, bullied by Bill in his childhood, is now a divorced dad who remains inactive in his relationship with his ex-wife (Laura Mennel) and teenage son Petey (Colin O’Brien), while Bill remains heavily affected by the monkey’s rampage decades later. Perkins attempts to craft thematic depth from this material, only for the film’s second half to come off as superficial.
The film ends up playing both ways: It’s a ridiculous comedy where people are, apparently, bodies made of jelly waiting to die a horrible death. Any sense of genuineness is washed away by a crude joke, while also being a heartfelt film about people understanding the nature of death and brotherhood. Of course, this clumsy balance does not work in its favor.
In all the times it tries to be sincere, these moments only feel juvenile. The style works well enough in its child-like nature — with its influences clearly seen in a “Goosebumps” poster in the twins’ childhood room — but doesn’t rise to be something as adult as a Stephen King story. For “The Monkey,” death is less an abstract, unknowable concept and more a source for gross-out humor, a violent canvas of destruction where all you can do is smugly say “that’s life.”
It’s strange that such thoughtless insight should come from Osgood Perkins of all people. Despite the muddled narrative of “Longlegs,” it carried a sense of fear from the ideas of control and repression. In “The Blackcoat’s Daughter,” the loneliness was felt throughout and made for an interesting depiction of Satanism. Yet, in “The Monkey,” with a concept as interesting and absurd as two brothers believing that a drum-banging monkey is the harbinger of death, there is nothing as compelling as Perkins’ prior films.
The same is said in terms of its filmmaking. The creep factor seen in his other works is diluted to fit the comedic tone, often relying on simple medium shots and having a less stylistic flair. Theo James and Christian Convery’s performances as Hal and Bill works as they create separate identities while being comedic enough in their differences — with the film using a good/bad twin concept to describe them — leading to an interesting acting job from the two.
The writing comes across as being overly edgy, with every other line having curse words in them, along with awkward character writing. Hal’s ex-wife has a fatherhood-guru husband (Elijah Wood), yet he never gets to play into anything despite the big-name actor. He doesn’t even get to have an ironic death.
That is what is most frustrating about “The Monkey.” The fact that it turns a Stephen King short story into a horror comedy is honestly a good idea, it just continues to squander any chance of intrigue. Beyond the bizarre deaths, the film lacks both horror and comedy, resulting in an underwhelming film that doesn’t leave a lasting impression like “Longlegs.”
The most that can be taken away from the movie is a fun time, but if there is a desire for figuring out what exactly it has to say on death and trauma, Perkins simply says it in the first act:
“Everybody dies. And that’s life.”
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