Funky 'Monkey'

Writer/director Osgood Perkins' latest is amusing, but that's about all it is.

The Monkey, the amusing new horror film from writer/director Osgood Perkins, is kind of about inherited trauma and kind of about the inevitably of death. But it’s really about Perkins expressing his oddball sense of humor. Indeed, what’s most surprising about The Monkey isn’t that it’s a comedy; it’s that it’s such a broad comedy.

Very (very) loosely based on a short story by Stephen King, The Monkey is about a killer wind-up children’s toy. Every time someone turns the key, the mechanical simian bangs its drums, immediately after which a poor schmoe nearby dies horribly, often via a Rube Goldberg-esque confluence of occurrences (almost exactly like in the Final Destination movies), but sometimes just due to terrible luck (e.g., an aneurysm, a stampede of horses, an uncoordinated Benihana chef) or the outright supernatural (as in the case of an angry swarm of bees that are oddly focused on harming one specific person and one specific person only).

The Monkey’s Monkey is first obtained by an airline pilot (Adam Scott) while abroad; even though he quickly learns of the toy’s insidious nature, for some reason he leaves it in possession of his family before abandoning them. It’s eventually discovered by his twin sons, Hal and Dennis (Christian Convery as children, Theo James as grown-ups), who are now being solely raised by their bitter, cynical mother, Lois (Tatiana Maslany). Before long, Hal and Dennis figure out the monkey’s destructive power; they also figure out that it’s indestructible, thus spurring them to toss it down a well, hopefully never to be seen again.

Of course, it is seen again, re-emerging when they’re estranged adults. Hal has a son, Petey (Colin O'Brien), who he voluntarily sees but once a year, fearing that the monkey will return and inflict the same sorts of tragedies upon Petey that it did upon him and Dennis. But the monkey inconveniently reappears while Hal and Petey are trying to enjoy their annual reunion, and all hell breaks loose.

Like Perkins’ recent surprise hit, Longlegs, The Monkey is short on character work and narrative and long on atmosphere. In this case, that atmosphere is wacky to the point of breaking reality; The Monkey often veers into Mel Brooks territory.

For example, if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen a moment where a young priest (Nicco Del Rio) stands in front of his congregation and audibly says “Oh, fuck,” as though he’s surprised to see them all or something. And perhaps you, like me, assumed this moment would make more sense within the context of the movie, and that there might be a good explanation for why a priest would swear so egregiously from the pulpit. But no. The moment unfolds just as randomly in the movie as it does in the coming attractions. It exists because Perkins thought it would be funny for a priest to say “fuck.” Period. End of story.

All well and good, ‘cept Mel Brooks films, for all of their many strengths, lack weight. This is a problem for The Monkey, because it wants to be weighty. It’s almost impossible to have paper-thin characters that seem to have stepped out of a cartoon, an array of ridiculous sight gags, and emotional gravitas. That Perkins favors jokes over logic makes this a real problem; Lois, for example, is outrageously insensitive and lacking in maternal instinct, which allows for some good jokes, but makes it hard to buy that her sons hold her in such high regard, even as they get older.

Perhaps even more problematic is that The Monkey never ties its dual themes together in any sort of meaningful way. Yeah, the boys got the toy from their absentee father (that’s the inherited trauma bit), and yeah, a lot of people around them die horribly and unexpectedly (that’s the death is a part of life bit), but the two threads never cohere into a unified whole. The brothers are each in their own movie, on their own journey: Hal is scared of passing on the curse to his son, while Dennis simply cannot make peace with the Monkey-inflicted death of a loved one. What does one thing have to do with the other?

I suppose you could argue that “learning to accept death” is a subsection of “learning to deal with inherited trauma,” but if that was Perkins’ intent, he has failed to hammer it home. There is likely a way to meld these binary concepts, but the filmmaker hasn’t found it. Consequently, it feels like he’s only nominally interested in exploring these topics; neither one gets the attention it deserves.

The good news is that The Monkey is occasionally very funny. Some of that is due to Perkins’ writing, some to extremely droll cuts by editors Graham Fortin and Greg Ng, and some to the cast, who are mostly pretty great. 

James is especially impressive; Hal and Dennis are polar opposites, so it’s no small feat for him to play them both (especially given that, again, they’re somewhat underwritten). But Maslany nearly steals the movie with a limited amount of screen time. Rohan Campbell, as a local burnout, also gets some choice comedic beats. Alas, Elijah Wood, in a one-scene cameo as Petey’s know-it-all stepfather, is, through no fault of his own, distracting more than he is amusing: Perkins just didn’t write him any decent gags. Perkins himself shows up for a couple of scenes as the boys’ uncle, and Perkins seems to find it hilarious that he gave himself mutton chops; your mileage on that may vary.

Insofar as the horror part of The Monkey is concerned, gorehounds should be relatively satisfied. There are two especially great deaths - one of which occurs right in the opening scene, one of which has already been released online as part of the flick’s promotional materials. Both sequences are at once creative and hilarious. If the rest of the kills were this entertaining, The Monkey might have even risen above its larger narrative issues. As it stands, The Monkey plays like a rough sketch of what could’ve been a much, much better movie.