<em>The Monkey</em> Is the Perfect Comedy for Our Times

The Monkey is the new film from Osgood Perkins, he of Longlegs and The Blackcoat’s Daughter. Perkins (liberally) adapted the film from a 1980 short story by Stephen King that later appeared in King’s collection Skeleton Crew.

The Monkey is a fucking dark, gorgeous, riot of a film. It’s a 180 degree turn from the queasiness of Longlegs, and often feels more like peak Raimi, or a fucked-up, somewhat bloodier take on Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. Get your most sicko friends and see it in as packed a theater as you can find, if possible. (My theater was about half-packed, I wore a mask as usual, and it was fun as hell. I want to go again.)  

The Shelburn twins, Bill and Hal, end up with an organ grinder monkey their long-gone dad brought back from his travels as a pilot. It seems like a normal, dead-eyed, soulless, creepy-as-hell monkey toy—but when you turn its key, and it plays its drum, people die. And not just like slipping on an icy staircase, or having a heart attack at an advanced age—no, the Monkey causes deaths of the “stampeding wild horses reduce a man to a red paste” and “a chain reaction of improbable events electrify a swimming pool, and the oblivious girl diving into the pool explodes on contact” variety.

The twins try to dispose of the monkey; it keeps coming back. Years later, extremely estranged from each other, the now-adult twins have to decide what to do when the monkey turns up again and its killing spree resumes.

There’s slightly more plot—and a fair bit more depth—than that, but not enough to spoil the fun.

If you’ve seen the trailers or know anything about the movie, you know what you’re in for: ever more violent/hilarious deaths, and Theo James giving a desperately funny performance as both twins trying to thwart (or at least keep up with) the carnage. He’s really amazing in the dual roles, and shows a ton of range—this is the kind of performance that I dearly wish would get awards attention if award-ers ever gave a shit about horror. The young Bill and Hal are also played by a single actor, Christian Convery, and I genuinely thought it was two twin boys playing the roles, he’s fantastic. Tatiana Maslany is perfect as the twins’ deadpan, no nonsense, shining diamond of a mother, Lois; Elijah Wood gives a brief performance as Hal’s ex’s new husband that made me laugh so hard I couldn’t see; I found Colin O’Brien quite moving as Hal’s son Petey who just wants a connection with his dad; and with just a couple of moments of screentime, I think Nicco Del Rio becomes the Greatest Minister In The History Of Cinema. Finally, I’m ecstatic to say that all of the assorted soon-to-be victims of the monkey fucking commit.  

The film walks a fine line between humanizing people just enough that were invested in their deaths, and remaining aloof enough that we find their deaths funny as hell. There are moments that bend reality a bit (I mean, even within the context of “the toy monkey can teleport and is killing people”) and I was perfectly happy to go with those moments.

The Monkey does take time for more subtle moments. The relationship between Lois and the boys is warm and weird in a way that creates a pocket of reality in the midst of all the monkey shenanigans, and grounds the rest of the film. The fact that first Lois and then Hal reprimand their respective children for swearing (with the shocked statement: “Language!”) as though that’s the thing that needs to be addressed, not Bill’s childhood sadism, or Hal’s refusal to be honest with his kid, or even the terrible twisted deaths that are occurring in with increasing frequency throughout the film, made me very happy. I also enjoyed the way The Monkey is set in “the 90s” and “Now,” but it’s also awash in retro Populuxe typography, songs like Shirley and Lee’s “Let the Good Times Roll” and Nina Simone’s version of “I Shall Be Released,” and a vaguely “1970s finished basement” vibe that keep it from feeling topical.

The other thing that worked beautifully was the way Perkins adapted the spirit of Stephen King. One of the things I love about King is that he understands that sometimes people are just assholes. Sometimes people just like being mean. They think it’s funny. They get off on the power of making other people upset. And hell, maybe they have trauma? But King understands that sometimes you need to accept that people can be assholes, and that while maybe there’s a tragic backstory there, maybe there should also be consequences for terrible behavior that hurts people. You know, in fiction, if not in life.

King’s human bullies are often worse than the story’s supernatural monster. Or in a few cases, the book’s heroes are able to cope with the monster because the human bullies are so bad. This is a dividing line for some people. I know there are people who read his stuff or watch the movies adapted from it, and think the bullies are too unrealistically cruel. And. Well. Maybe I just went to a series of extra-bad public schools? Perkins captures this extremely well, with multiple characters who just SUCK. And given that people who get off on being mean seem to be in cultural ascendance at the moment, I appreciated his commitment to that aspect of King’s tone.

I thought of this because in the theater I was in, people laughed uproariously at all the Grand Guignol deaths, but a person behind me kept murmuring things along the lines of “But, why? Why is this happening?” during the scenes when one of the two Shelburn twins is bullied and humiliated by a tween girl gang at the other twins behest. (That gang scares me way more than the fucking monkey.) But it just hit me again: This person, who I heard laughing with the rest of us at the monkey shenanigans, balked at the human cruelty. If I was in a different mood it might give me hope.

I don’t mean to imply, by the way, that there are no decent people, either in the film or in life, because there are. There are adults who do their best with the kids who need them, there are kids that won’t give up on their parents no matter how often they’re pushed away. There’s the fact the one of the two Shelburn twins has shaped his whole life around protecting people from the monkey.

And, sure, maybe the monkey is also A METAPHOR FOR DEATH ITSELF, and really the whole point of the movie is to get people to accept that death is a part of life, and to stop trying to hide from it or bury it—but also, who cares? Just like with those dorks who think we live in a simulation, thinking the monkey’s a metaphor doesn’t change anything. When you hit the surface of the electrified pool water, you’re still gonna explode.

Osgood Perkins is maybe, actually, the best person alive to talk to us about death. His dad was Norman Bates, for fuck’s sake. But years after that role made him infamous (and after Oz also played Norman as a child in Psycho II) his father died a horrific, public death from AIDs in 1992, when homophobia and bigotry turned deaths from AIDs into media circuses. The day before the ninth anniversary of his father’s death, Perkins’ mother, the actor Berry Berenson, died when the plane she was in crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

I mention this because Perkins has talked about his parents in interviews, himself, and because if he of all people wants to make a Final Destination-style movie about the absurdity of death, I’m going to come with him on the trip.

The tagline on the Monkey’s box is “like life”—and the deaths in The Monkey are like life. They’re absurd and stupid, sometimes funny and sometimes heartbreaking. And what I loved was that the film sent me back out into the night with a sense of gleeful nihilism that is exactly what I need right now.

I say nihilism, but I think people often assumes that means something negative. It doesn’t, really. It’s just that reality is infinitely malleable. Some children are born in countries that get bombed into rubble by other, more powerful countries, and their short lives are spent in agony and grief. Some children are born into wealth and privilege, private schools on speed dial, private jets on the tarmac. Some people lose their parents at a young age and have to learn to live without them; some are still caring for elderly parents as they themselves cross the line from “middle-aged” to “elderly.” Some people get to chase their dreams, and some have to put theirs on the backburner and focus on sheer survival.

None of these people “deserved” what they got—it’s just what they got, and all of them end up dead at the end. I like a movie that acknowledges that absurdity, and challenges its audience to laugh in Death’s grinning face.