The newest film from Osgood Perkins is an instant gallows humor classic.
As a child, I was obsessed with my own death. From the moment I learned that I would one day die, it was routinely all I could think about. I remember laying awake at night, staring at the ceiling, terrified that I might die in the night and that I’d never know. The vastness of it terrified me, and that was even before I had contemplated how everyone I knew would also die. Sometimes I will still find myself feeling my mind wander to this ultimate fact, that all our lives have, essentially, the same ending.
Quite obviously director Osgood Perkins has had similar moments, as this cruel fact serves as the central cornerstone of his new film The Monkey. Even the movie’s tagline is “Everybody dies.” An adaptation of a Stephen King short story, the film’s script lifts the topline premise (killer monkey toy) and a few character names to craft a mostly original tale about the inevitability and carelessness of death. But rather than using that story structure as means of dread, Perkins takes a more surprising approach. He makes a joke of death’s inscrutable nature.
One is loath to open the box on what is and isn’t a horror film. But perhaps the most surprising thing about the Monkey, given its morose subject matter, is that it puts its humor front and center. This isn’t a scary movie or even a tense one; it is a hilarious comedy about a horrific topic. It blends the madcap zaniness of an Evil Dead film with the Rube Goldberg death mechanics of a Final Destination. By making a joke of death, of our shared fate, Perkins is able to show the cosmic absurdity of it all and make an all-time gallows humor classic.
Hal Shelburn has a problem. There is a monkey that has been haunting him, namely a toy monkey drummer that was left behind by his deadbeat father. That wouldn’t seem to be a problem, except that every time the monkey bangs his drum, someone Hal knows dies a horrific death. The only person who knows Hal’s secret is his twin brother Bill, and after causing one death too many, Hal knows he has to bury the monkey in a well. But when mysterious, cataclysmic deaths begin occurring again in Hal’s adulthood, he realizes that monkey must be back, and that he has to stop it once and for all.
This barebones premise serves as the background for the main event of the film: a series of increasingly grisly and innovative death, depicted in glorious gory detail. But the deaths are never lingered upon, but rather hyperbolically horrific. At one point a character is trampled to death in a sleeping bag to the point where they appear to be transformed to hamburger meat. Another death involves someone diving into an electrified pool, which for some reason causes their body to immediately explode.
The scale and absurdity of these deaths make them less disturbing to behold as they are delightfully silly, taking the often overwhelming topic of gruesome ends and making them a spectacle. It belittles death as a concept, laughing in its face and defanging it. The end result is both satisfying and cathartic, taking the ultimate fear shared by all people and making it a punchline. Perkins’s last film, horror-thriller Longlegs, struggled balancing a tone of dread versus campiness. There is no such tone disjointedness here. This film puts it’s foot on the gas for the silly, and is all the better for it.
Perkins is buoyed by some fantastic performances, most centrally Theo James, who plays both the adult versions of Hal and Bill. Hal never plays the comedy of his circumstances, fully committed to playing the horror of the circumstances. But even as the deaths grow more and more ridiculous the longer the Monkey’s reign of terror lasts, even within the structure of the film, Hal seems to be aware of just how absurd it all has become. The always wonderful Tatiana Maslany plays the twins’ mother, whose brash and unfiltered style of mothering should be an inspiration to all parents. Even one-scene cameos by Adam Scott and Elijah Wood delight, even if they beg for more screen time.
But it is the Monkey itself that serves as the true star of the show. Little more than a pair of wide eyes, an unnerving grin, and a spinning drumstick, the little guy is consistently one of the greatest comic presences of the film. Really it is all in the edit; anytime the movie cuts to the little guy, his eyes wide, observing all, it elicits a devilish grin. And that is the power of the film; when the avatar of death, the very embodiment of destruction rears its head, you don’t feel dread. You feel joy.
