“Everybody dies and that’s fucked up” is the tagline and emo ethos of snarky Stephen King adaptation The Monkey, a film about the inescapable inevitability yet goofy silliness of death. The writer-director Osgood Perkins, who scored a hit with last year’s Longlegs, knows more about it than most. His father, the actor Anthony Perkins, died of Aids when Osgood was 18 and then his mother, the actor and model Berry Berenson, died in the September 11 attacks as a passenger on Flight 11. Perkins has found a way to work through something so unimaginably awful with a career as a horror film-maker, and his latest, focused on twins cursed by generational trauma is his most obviously personal film yet.
To his credit, Perkins has chosen not to wallow in the grim dirge associated with trauma and the horror genre. The original script for The Monkey had apparently delivered its central conceit – a toy monkey that brings death to those around it – with a straight face, something he found to be discordant, insisting a lighter, comedy-over-horror makeover. But the humour here is far too smug and nihilistic, similar to the grating can-you-believe-we’re-doing-this swagger of the Deadpool series, so happy with itself that it doesn’t really care if anyone else is smiling too. The film has a juvenile middle-finger-up attitude that confuses broad fuck-the-world misanthropy for actual edginess, annoying enough for a scene but close to insufferable for an entire movie. It’s also a tone that doesn’t really work for a King adaptation and when a flash of his earnestness does shine through, it’s uncomfortably out of place, providing more of a jolt than any of the ineffective death scenes which rely on brash and empty Looney Tunes violence. If the aim is numbing us to the shock of a violent death then perhaps the film succeeds but surely we shouldn’t be quite so bored by it too.
The film begins as the monkey has already been causing havoc, a bloodied, end-of-tether father (a cameo-ing Adam Scott) desperately trying to offload it. After he bolts, leaving his twin sons (Christian Convery on double duty) with their mother (Tatiana Maslany, far better than the writing deserves) and a closet full of knickknacks, the monkey returns. The boys slowly figure out its power: every time the key in its back is turned, the ensuing drums count down to death and a gruesome “accident” happens to someone nearby. Once the monkey is “vanquished”, the brothers go their own ways but 25 years later, it’s back and the estranged siblings (now played by Theo James) must find a way to put an end to its killing spree.
Credit must go to backers Neon for another effective yet effectively misleading marketing campaign. While Longlegs was pushed as the year’s most terrifying movie (it wasn’t), The Monkey has been sold as a horror movie with comedic elements (it’s the opposite). With a budget of around $10m, it’s likely to be another high-profit win for them but in a year that has already lumped us with Companion, Heart Eyes and The Gorge, it’s another loss for horror fans of even the vaguest level of discernment, gimmickry still taking precedence over tight storytelling.
While Longlegs had a similarly scrappy script, it was at least made with real style, Perkins capable of imagery that cuts through even when his writing couldn’t. But The Monkey is poorly lit and visually drab, a film set in the 90s and the present that takes more cues from the 70s. James is also a little too stiff for the material, awkwardly playing straight man in a ridiculous world, but the tone would be hard for most actors to figure out. The comedy is so persistently misfiring that it’s often hard to even understand where the joke is supposed to be, the only laughs at my screening in response to the garish gore.
There is no sense of dread or fear despite the setup with each death scene staged without a build of suspense or any interest in stakes, just another body exploding into mush. Even the gore itself is too cartoonish to penetrate, a mess of repetitive and boringly uninventive splatter with Perkins failing to match even the laziest of the Final Destination sequels (the fourth one, if you’re interested). Not only did those films employ elaborate effort in the construction but they also found just the right balance of comedy and horror, gleefully ghoulish yet grounded enough for us to wince at the pain being inflicted. The deaths here are neither funny nor scary or even gross enough to linger, we’re all rendered unshockable far too soon. The engine also allows for so much more juice – who dies next, how will they die, how can one safeguard against it – and while these questions are teased at in the first act, Perkins has no real interest in taking his film seriously enough to build any dramatic tension. If death is so meaningless then ultimately so is his movie.
The Monkey is out in US and UK cinemas on 21 February, and in Australian cinemas now
