The Monkey — Oz Perkins

In Oz Perkins’ The Monkey, a mechanical wind-up monkey that plays a drum (but don’t call it a toy) serves as a harbinger of death. And not the kind of drawn-out demise of sickness or age that will likely fell the majority of us, but rather, the sort that strikes without notice or reason and has the tendency to reduce a person to steaming piles of taco meat. This mystical, seemingly indestructible object of unknown provenance is less a weapon that can be trained on someone specific than it is willingly inviting randomness and chaos into the world and the mistake of the film’s characters is believing they’re able to wield it to a specific malicious end. The film treats death as inevitable and a cosmic joke that robs the innocent of both life and dignity, where the only reasonable response is to throw one’s head back in laughter at its absurdity and cruelty. It’s all rather glib and juvenile, but it’s not impersonal. Here it must be noted that Perkins’ mother, the actress Berry Berenson, was killed on September 11 when her flight was hijacked by al-Qaeda and crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, which is the sort of thing that’s prone to shape someone’s perspective on the unfairness of death. One might argue it’s in poor taste to invoke 9/11 in a review of a horror movie about an evil wind-up monkey, but, then, it is a pretty tasteless film.

Loosely based on a Stephen King short story, the titular monkey is practically an heirloom passed down from generation to generation after coming into the possession of the Shelburn family patriarch (Adam Scott, briefly) in his world travels before he abandoned his wife Lois (Tatiana Maslany) and identical twin adolescent boys Hal and Bill (the young actor Christian Convery, doing double duty). In a dynamic that will play out for the rest of their lives, Hal is the more thoughtful and meeker of the two while Bill is your typical butthead who torments his ever-so-slightly younger brother for sport (it’s a credit to Convery that the two feel like unique characters, with Hal appearing to be of smaller stature than Bill when in reality it’s just a matter of the actor’s posture and him wearing glasses). While rooting around in dad’s stuff, the boys find a large box with a sure-to-be-symbolic “like life” emblazoned on it — as opposed to “lifelike” — and inside they find the dead-eyed mechanical primate introduced in the film’s prologue. Turning the key in its back, the monkey begins banging on its drum, accompanied by circus music, but nothing actually happens — at first, anyway. Soon enough, however, the boys’ babysitter takes them out for hibachi, where a flirty teppanyaki chef accidentally decapitates the young woman with a wayward flip of his knife (if you’re wondering whether Perkins will show the babysitter’s head slowly sliding off its neck only to land on the sizzling hot griddle, you clearly don’t know what sort of movie you’ve signed up for). Gradually realizing the monkey’s power, Hal, having tired of Bill’s constant bullying, activates it again hoping it will kill his brother, only for its aim to miss its mark. Bill arrives home from school just in time to witness their beloved mother die from an exceedingly rare aneurysm (of the sort that supposedly afflicts one in 40 million and leaves its victim bleeding profusely from their eyes and mouth). Orphaned, the two boys are shipped off to rural Maine to live with an aunt and uncle where, after failing to destroy the monkey, they try to rid themselves of it by dropping it down a dry well where the cursed tchotchke presumably remained for 25 years.

Hal, now an adult played by the actor Theo James, has cut off all connection to what remains of his family and has led a solitary existence devoid of attachments, although that’s complicated by him having fathered a moody teenage boy, Petey (Colin O’Brien), who Hal gets to see only one week a year. With Petey set to be legally adopted by Hal’s ex’s new husband (Elijah Wood, in an unctuous cameo which feels like someone called in a favor), Hal and Petey plan on treating their annual week together as a last hurrah when Hal receives a call from the deeply estranged Bill (also played by James, but sporting a mullet to help keep the two characters straight while reinforcing how emotionally stunted he is). Bill informs him that their aunt has died in a freak accident — the sort of death that has several pronounced and ignominious stages to it and comes to define the sort of overkill that Perkins favors in the film’s second half — and, suspecting that the monkey has magically returned, demands that Hal travel to Maine to tend to the aunt’s estate. Cowed into compliance and forced to drag Petey along for the ride, Hal is confronted by a series of horrifying, splattery deaths — above all, The Monkey is the sort of film where characters are constantly being doused in firehouses of viscera as though they’re seated in the “Soak Zone” at SeaWorld — that befall helpless bystanders. If the monkey has indeed returned, then either it’s taken on a life of its own or someone is turning its key. A lot.

Perkins’ Longlegs became a surprise minor sensation last summer, riding a wave of self-generated “scariest movie ever” hype to a big box office before word of mouth kicked in and sank any longevity like a stone. Still, in a genre that’s quick to elevate filmmakers to the level of dependable brands, Perkins’ mix of chilly formalism and portentousness set him apart from his peers. Although filmed before Longlegs was released, The Monkey feels like a concerted rebuke of the earlier film. If Longlegs employed self-seriousness and an almost hermetic approach to shot composition as a smokescreen to disguise how fundamentally hollow it was, The Monkey is almost the exact inverse. On the face of it, there’s little to The Monkey beyond gallows humor, with the film never missing an opportunity to poke fun at itself, lest anyone accuse Perkins of taking himself too seriously. To list but a couple examples: a young priest presiding over a funeral is introduced with the demeanor of someone who moments earlier took a giant bong rip and greets the congregation with an “oh fuck” before starting the service, while Perkins casts himself as a creepy uncle with mutton chops who tries to comfort a grieving Hal that he and his aunt will do their best in raising him and his brother, before conceding that they’ll still probably do a lousy job. The film functions, then, primarily as an exercise in grim one-upmanship, less concerned with intricate Rube Goldberg-style machinations like its forebears in the Final Destination franchise than in devising unique ways to turn the human body into a confetti cannon; cheerfully skipping past the humanity of the film’s victims and rightly viewing them as quasi-sentient sacks of blood and guts. When a sexy young woman is electrocuted after diving into a swimming pool, she explodes like an unpunctured hotdog in the microwave. The Monkey understands that’s not how that actually works (or one hopes it does), but it’s playing to the cheap seats; the more raucous the reaction from the midnight crowds, the better.

But there’s also an impishness to the film that (ironically) prevents it from drawing actual blood. It’s all in good fun provided you’ve got the stomach for it — non-gorehounds who don’t find anything amusing in seeing people turned into Sunday gravy need not apply — but the law of diminished returns kicks in after the third or fourth time watching someone combust into a cloud of red mist and body parts. As the film heads into the homestretch, the flimsiness of the conceit starts to become a real liability. Yet a sub-agenda emerges within the film right around the time it starts to explore who’s controlling the monkey and to what end, taking a pointed if uncontroversial view of how self-defeating rage is, how indiscriminate its consequences are, and how transient the dopamine high of giving into bloodlust is. It would be a mischaracterization to imply that The Monkey is either especially thoughtful or concerned with morality, but it does rightly identify the petulance and illogic at the heart of rancor, blinding people to how irrational and futile it is. One of the film’s most surreal moments comes when a corpse is wheeled out of a crime scene where a previously unseen pep squad, complete with brightly colored pom poms, has gathered to enthusiastically cheer on the spectacle. It mostly plays as unprocessed weirdness — a Perkins specialty — serving as a drive-by commentary on the scene before being put out of mind until that same pep squad gets a rather macabre callback in the film’s closing seconds, where the takeaway is both nebulous and innately understood. Whether it’s unhappiness, misfortune, or, yes, even death, we’re all one “there but for the grace of God” away from our own turn in the barrel.