Osgood Perkins – to judge by the slew of promo emails which have continued to arrive at Warped Perspective this year – is a very busy bee. He’s put out three features in two years; no sooner had Longlegs (2024) garnered perhaps more than its fair share of gushing critical attention, than gleeful emails concerning The Monkey – a reimagining of the Stephen King short story – started to arrive. There’s a lot to be said for making use of any momentum you can gather in indie film, but whether Perkins’s prolific output stems from luck or judgement, slowing down a little wouldn’t have hurt. Like Longlegs, there are issues around coherence, only exacerbated here by a kind of additional, clumsy self-regard. The Monkey is far more pleased with itself than it has any business being.
We start at a pawnbrokers: one of the film’s odd peccadilloes, to mention one of them early, seems to be filling its shots with tat. Pawnshops, cluttered closets, yard sales – The Monkey is rammed full of knick-knacks, with a knick-knack at its very centre, as if Perkins is one-upping all of the other indie directors with a similar regard for old bits and pieces, though usually in their cases for reams of defunct analogue tech. Into the pawn shop walks a guy hoping to offload a creepy drumming monkey whose drumming signals ‘bad things’ are about to happen, which is a sizeable understatement, though understandable at this point. The guy, Petey (a cameo from Severance‘s Adam Scott) then offers us a framing device, as a flashback takes us to his own father’s childhood and the origins of a strange family curse.
The monkey has been in the family for a long time. Petey’s father Hal and his twin brother Bill (Christian Convery) had no father in their lives; all that was left of dad was a closet full of – you’ve guessed it – tat, though it takes the family a while to explore and find the drumming monkey, an item which is, to give it its dues, a pretty cool-looking object. All seems okay, briefly, but one evening as mom (Tatiana Maslany) heads off on a blind date as if dating were some kind of weird penance, the boys head to a restaurant with their babysitter – and the toy monkey. This commences a long line of what seem to be freak occurrences, though often focused on blameless women, it seems. Once they realise its power, the brothers try to get rid of the monkey, making sure by dismembering it and hurling it down a well, and it seems as though they’ve solved their problem. But twenty-five years later…
The story here is simple enough – cursed item plagues family – and there’s really not enough in the short story alone to pad out a feature-length film, so Perkins has made a series of decisions on how to get things over the feature-length line. It seems like a few things held sway during this process: make it gory; make it funny; extend the backstory of the monkey, so that it has a more complex presence in the story overall. Perhaps the feeling of satisfaction with these changes overshadowed the actual success at delivering them. It certainly feels that way. It’s not outré enough to be a genuine horror comedy; it’s more of a slacker comedy if it’s a comedy at all, but its theme of absent or awful parents is an odd fit and too high in the mix to really allow audiences to laugh. The script is garbled too, coining words (‘willish’?) or throwing in the odd, needless Stephen King reference, but it’s glib for too long to really land any emotional impact when it maybe wants to do that later in its runtime. Similarly, once it decides to turn into a version of The Ring, the impact is still negligible. It hasn’t convinced up until this point.
But to judge by the wealth of promotional materials inviting us to pore over the film’s goriest sequences, the gore was always intended to be this film’s biggest calling card. What a shame, then, that it’s so dreadfully handled. Sandwiched in amongst the film’s thin family plot elements, there’s a smattering – and only a smattering, really – of flimsy, obvious CGI which is so cheap-looking that it takes you out of the family plot with all of its additional characters altogether. The film seems determined to build up to set pieces which are utterly disappointing in execution, even if there’s some novel thinking behind them somewhere. The whole thing feels murky and inconsistent, ambitious without due diligence, which at best is down to the quick turnover necessary to get this film out this year, and at worst, is simply the after-effects of hype. Perkins clearly has love and regard for genre film, but the sincere hope is that when his next film appears – in 2026 – there’s more evident care and attention for the basics in the end product, and a lot more depth overall.
The Monkey (2025) is available to watch now.