The Monkey features demented kills and a wild Theo James performance, but the deliberately campy vibe may not suit all horror fans.
Last Updated on March 4, 2025
PLOT: As children, two twin brothers find their father’s old wind-up toy monkey. It turns out that the toy carries a terrible curse, as every time they wind it up, someone random will die a horrible death. Twenty-five years later, the monkey once again enters the lives of the now estranged twins (Theo James), wreaking grisly havoc around anyone who gets too close to them.
REVIEW: The Monkey is strikingly different from director Osgood Perkins’s last film, Longlegs, a grisly, ultra-serious serial killer thriller that was the sleeper hit of the summer. Eschewing that film’s dark and foreboding vibe, The Monkey is bug-nuts insane, with it a deliberately campy, gore-soaked flick, which will undoubtedly be a love-it-or-hate-it kind of thing for genre fans. It seems destined for future cult status, as it will certainly play to a more niche audience than Longlegs. Still, the people who love it might help turn it into a midnight movie perennial, making this a fun one to see on the big screen with an enthusiastic audience.
Perkins is aiming for a darkly comic vibe here, with him obviously wanting audiences to laugh at its excessiveness rather than scream (similar to the recent breakout smash, The Substance). It’s among the goriest films in recent memory, with absolutely nothing safe from the monkey’s wrath, including men, women, children and even babies. Yet, it’s all done in such a heightened way that it’s more amusing (in a grand guignol kind of way) than truly terrifying.
The heightened vibe extends to Perkins’s cast, with Theo James having a whale of a time as Hal and Bill, the grown-up versions of the young twins who find the monkey (Sweet Tooth’s Christian Convery plays them in the lengthy prelude). Watching James here, I was reminded of Dan Stevens when he made The Guest – not necessarily because the roles are similar but because of how different the part is from anything he’s ever played before. With his posh English accent and good looks, James is often cast as a heartthrob. Here he’s convincing as both the mousy Hal (who’s a deadbeat dad trying to reconnect with his teen son) and – especially – as the demented Bill, who allows him to go over-the-top in a way he never has before. James really looks like he’s having the time of his life here, and the vibe is infectious.
The Monkey is definitely a great vehicle for James, although Tatiana Maslany steals scenes in the first part of the movie as Hal and Bill’s sarcastic mother – who’s unfazed by the gruesome deaths that start happening around her kids, and even bemused by the excessiveness of some of them. My only issue is that the comic vibe of The Monkey is at its best when it doesn’t try too hard, as a moment with Elijah Wood, who makes a cameo, feels a little too obviously silly, and seems at odds with the rest of the movie.
Of course, genre fans will want to know if the movie delivers on the gore front. Rest assured, this is one of the goriest movies you’d ever want to see, with bodies being smashed up and turned into viscera in ways that still surprised me despite decades worth of horror movies under my belt. If anything, what impressed me about The Monkey was that Perkins could make two such strikingly different horror movies in less than a year (with a third on the way) without either feeling like a throwaway. Perkins, as we all know, is the son of the great Anthony Perkins, who, in addition to starring in Psycho, also wrote one of the great camp thrillers of the seventies, The Last of Sheila. I feel like if Perkins was still around, he would have gotten a major kick out of this one. So, if you’re like me and you like a little (intentional) camp thrown into your genre flicks now and then, The Monkey is for you.
