The enveloping, engrossing Longlegs and the darkness within it are still fresh in my mind as I write this, my second-ever review of an Osgood Perkins film. However, if Perkins was flexing his ‘80s Satanic Panic muscles with Longlegs, consider his adaptation of Stephen King’s short story The Monkey to be his twisted version of a Zucker Brothers movie, only with copious amounts of blood and viscera instead of slapstick and parody. (One might call it “splatstick,” if one were so inclined.) Perkins angles for comedy of the blackest kind with The Monkey, an antidote for the heart-palpitating seriousness of Longlegs, but it’s comedy on his skewed terms.
But it’s not all gore and entrails (although the first five minutes of the movie set that facet up nicely), as Perkins takes wild swings at themes about family, guilt, revenge, generational trauma, and the randomness of life and death, all of which are explored amid the inventive kills. This isn’t just a squick-for-squick’s-sake movie like Damian Leone’s Terrifier or Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste; The Monkey revels in the sporadic nature of death and how it comes for everyone, sooner or later. And when it comes for people in this movie, it comes with the thunder of drums and calliope music. (In King’s short story, the monkey only played cymbals, one of the many changes in Perkins’ expansion.)
Perkins is at his most playful here, relishing every edit and freeze-frame (gack!) intent on creating a fiendish push-pull with the audience. He wants us to laugh at the extremity of these situations, whether it’s the frivolity of a too-casual priest delivering a half-assed funeral sermon, bodies exaggeratedly exploding from gunshots or electrocution, or even the sight of “a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death.” Things like this – right down to the final, hilariously brutal shot – show us exactly how Perkins wants us to take this entire movie: as events of a life full of coincidence and odd circumstances.
It’s this life in which twin brothers Bill and Hal Shelburn (Christian Convery in dual roles) are caught up after their father, Pete (Adam Scott), tries to sell a drumming monkey toy to an unsuspecting pawnbroker, warning that if it starts playing, “we are all fucked to hell.” Of course, when the monkey starts playing its drum and nothing happens, the pawnbroker doesn’t believe Pete… until a Rube Goldberg-style chain of events results in a disgusting disembowelment. It’s gross, but it’s done in such a way that will cause you to snort with disbelieving laughter in spite of yourself. (Depending on your sense of humor.) This prologue accurately establishes the kind of journey on which Perkins beckons us to join him, and this movie is full of these kinds of catch-you-by-surprise shenanigans.
The monkey (repeatedly stated to be “not a toy – don’t call it a ‘toy’!”) is destroyed before the film’s title hangs and sinisterly misaligns in black space, but it turns right back up when Pete’s sons – who, along with his wife, he’s abandoned – go looking through his stuff. As children, both of them tragically witness firsthand how the power of the monkey works; accidents and aneurysms happen, but they’re framed largely through the brothers’ “action equals consequences” lenses – turn the key, and someone’s gonna drop dead. Would these deaths and calamities have happened had the key not been turned? There’s enough leeway on either side to give credence to the monkey’s direct influence or lack of it, especially due to the monkey’s supernatural nature; after all, how many times can it be dismembered or immolated and come back intact? However, looking at it purely objectively and taking the monkey out of the situation, it seems that the Shelburns are simply unlucky. (The evidence is borne out by the aforementioned final shot.)
The Monkey spends its time making the most of the Shelburns’ bad luck, which the boys’ mother Lois (Tatiana Maslany) softens as just the one universal constant of death. “Everybody dies,” she says to them after attending the funeral of someone sent to an early grave after the monkey plays its drum. Both brothers take their reactions to this aphorism into their adulthood, where Bill and Hal (Theo James, also in a dual role) are estranged from each other and leading nondescript, isolated lives. Everyone’s passed them on the food chain, including Hal’s ex-wife and her fatherhood guru husband, who tell Hal to his face that he’s being cut off completely from his son Petey (Colin O’Brien). But when the monkey mysteriously reappears after 25 years and starts causing havoc again, Hal starts thinking that Petey might be safer with his mom and stepdad, leading to why his own father ran out on the family after the prologue: to keep loved ones out of harm’s way.
Hal’s also been living with the guilt that he might’ve killed a loved one after using the monkey in a moment of anger at his brother. It’s a guilt that has caused his solitude and nervous nature; Theo James makes Hal seem like he’s always looking over his shoulder, anticipating someone finding out what he did and why. He fumbles through conversations in both eras, but as an adult, it’s even more pronounced, never rising to any occasion to stand up for himself, whether it’s with his son, his wife’s husband, or even at gunpoint. Christian Convery likewise gives his young version of Hal the meek treatment, having been stepped on constantly by his older-by-three-minutes brother or a gang of toughs at school who take both mental and physical measures to humiliate him.
Conversely, both actors dig in with their portrayals of Bill, the bully who thinks he’s King Shit. Forgive the profanity, but there is no better term for how both play this character, taking every chance to lord Bill’s superiority-by-happenstance over Hal. As a child, Convery gives Bill a rowdy, me-first persona that takes pleasure in making sure his brother doesn’t get what he wants without some kind of punitive insult. Whether it’s the schoolyard handshake psych-out or commanding Hal to say something self-incriminating before any kind of reward is given, Bill is scripted and performed by Convery to be the quintessential asshole big brother, which paves the way for how James plays him as an adult. Locked away from the world, Bill has holed up in a spot where he’s fashioned himself a king (I don’t reuse that word lightly), commanding others to do his bidding and protecting himself with lethal traps in case someone makes the monkey work again.
That Bill is older by sheer nature also feeds into this film’s theme of chance and coincidence. Is he only acting this way because he’s older and thinks he’s got the right to be horrible to his brother, or is it just who he is? Questions like these lay the groundwork for The Monkey, elevating it beyond being a deliciously executed, gory, dark comedy of errors. The movie attacks with over-the-top death scenes that require the lightest of touches to balance out, which Osgood Perkins handles with deft ease, allowing us a rest before cranking out another memorable sequence of something going squish. The loftier aspects are often buried under punchy bits of action or Hal’s guiding narration, but Perkins has combined everything into a gloriously messy, freaky package that doesn’t overstay its welcome (well, there is that one freeze-frame…), burrowing in nice and tight in its short span while plotting a quick escape – during which, of course, heads will roll.
(Author’s note: This was the most tame trailer I could find. And even then, the last shot before the title is… you’ll get the picture.)
