Director: Osgood Perkins
Starring: Theo James, Tatiana Mislay, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell, Sarah Levy, Adam Scott, Elijah Wood
Certificate: 15
Run Time: 98 mins

After reaching new career heights with the excellent Longlegs last year, director Osgood Perkins’ follow-up sees him adapt Stephen King’s 1980 short story of a cursed monkey that brings death and destruction. Adding further excitement behind the camera is horror maestro James Wan, who produces the film. The Monkey follows twin brothers Hal and Bill (Christian Convery in their formative years and Theo James as an adult). Bill is the more confident of the two and bullies Hal and they live with their mother Lois (Tatiana Maslany) after their father, Peter (Adam Scott) disappears. In the opening scene, we see Petey try to pawn off the drum-playing monkey but to bloody effect, yet the monkey somehow finds its way back in a closet in his belongings which the boys discover. When they wind its key, the monkey plays its drums later that evening at a Japanese restaurant, with their babysitter finding themselves accidentally decapitated and so begins a vicious cycle of gory slayings.

The Monkey is hugely enjoyable with some brilliant set-pieces and striking imagery. Perkins is the perfect pick to direct this project, having himself lost his parents in headline-making ways. He decides to intentionally avoid subtlety and use the film’s sadistic gore to joke about the absurdity, pointlessness and randomness of death. That’s a genius approach and really distinguishes The Monkey from more serious horror films about possessed toys, of which there have been many. The film’s brilliantly edited and it packs a real wallop in its breakneck pacing as it hurtles through its sub-100 minute run time. The humour really works in places – especially how a man reacts to their neighbour getting gruesomely slain in a lawnmower incident, and the film is brimming with Perkins’ signature style in terms of the mise-en-scène. The monkey itself of a wonderfully creepy design – James Wan is no stranger to the genre after all being behind the similarly evil creations of Jigsaw in the Saw films and Annabelle in The Conjuring Universe.

The cast are all very game, with Theo James making for a strong lead (although he’s more convincing as Hal). This is very much his and Christian Convery’s film – you’d be lucky to be a member of the supporting cast and survive for very long! Still, Tatiana Maslany stands out as the mother and Elijah Wood laps it up as the new husband of Hal’s ex-wife in a brief, but very funny appearance.

My only real flaw with the film is that its third act feels a little divorced from the first two because it begins to leans in more to fantasy and the philosophical, feeling more Stephen King-like. I still really enjoyed the it though, and there’s some truly haunting imagery as the film ends, especially as we see the consequences of the town’s devastation.

The Monkey is another winner from Perkins and it’s a very coherent film with clear influences from King and Wan that really elevate it. The decision to lean into the absurdity of death is a particularly strong choice and it’s a real blood-drenched thrill ride from start to finish.