The Monkey Barrels Along Without Rhyme or Reason
Osgood Perkins' follow-up to Longlegs lacks any smarts or charm.
Wind up a sinister toy primate and someone dies. That rule ought to be simple and streamlined enough to follow, but in Osgood Perkins' The Monkey, it makes for a scattershot narrative conceit, swinging quickly from humorous, Rube Goldberg-ian kills, to some kind of spiritual possession, to unfortunate medical emergencies — all with no explanation. This is, on the surface, "like life" — the phrase branded on the old-fashioned hatbox in which the cursed trinket is discovered — but the film's ruminations on mortality and remorse are restrained by a tonally haphazard approach, laced with an irony that's neither funny nor bitter enough to make a lasting impact.
As a piece in and of itself, The Monkey is a hobbling attempt at a roller coaster ride that never finds the right rhythm, either in its peaks and valleys, or its twists and turns. As a follow-up to Perkins' Longlegs — a film that, for all its flaws, contains an atmospheric dread — it's a bizarre effort that makes the former feel like a fluke. Where Perkins' serial killer predecessor had a claustrophobic sensibility, The Monkey features little in the way of visual or thematic cohesion, and is bound mostly by errant snark à la Deadpool, which clashes wildly with its numerous hints towards poignancy around parenthood and death.
The titular Monkey.
The prologue features Adam Scott as a frazzled, attention-grabbing character we sadly never see again, even though his connection to the main plot is semi-hinted towards by some very specific costume choices that suggest… well, it's not worth getting into, since nothing comes of it. This introduction bursts forth with the zany visual energy of a Final Destination film, and what follows is a major promise: a domino effect of blood and guts that taps into a level of gross cinematic delight the movie otherwise fails to equal (some of its subsequent deaths even occur off-screen). The Monkey is based on a Stephen King short story of the same name, though the two are only nominally related (not unlike the prologue and the central story). King's cymbal-clashing toy ape is traded for one that spins and smashes drumsticks, a sound accompanied by a random, inevitable death, as is quickly discovered by middle school-aged twin brothers Hal and Bill (Christian Convery, Sweet Tooth's Gus).
The monkey's plastered grin feels malicious, making it the fitting externalization of the twins' frustrations towards each other — Bill is a cool kid, Hal is a loser — and their temptations to use the damn thing to wreak havoc. It seems to work on the same magical, metaphysical non-principles as the eerie dolls in Longlegs, but what's frustrating isn't the movie's lack of mechanical explanation, but rather, its lack of dramatic coherence. Real, flesh-and-blood characters with nuances and personalities are often dispensed with in comedic fashion. This grinds all hints of pathos (attempted by the plot and dialogue) into nihilistic dust. The result is a jet-black meanness that fits uncomfortably with the reflective voiceover from an adult Hal in the future (Theo James) — who we eventually meet after a time jump — and with the kindly advice provided by the boys' mother (Tatiana Maslany) in the wake of their father leaving.
Theo James plays the adult Hal, who must contend with his and his brother’s actions as children.
The film is, at first glance, as personal to Perkins as Longlegs was, given his complicated relationships to both his parents: a father at a distance (Psycho star Anthony Perkins), whose sexual identity and illness from AIDS was hidden from him until it was too late, and a mother (photographer Berry Berenson) who helped harbor this secret, and who died in the attacks on September 11th. It's no wonder that the suddenness of death becomes a frequent point of inflection in The Monkey, but that its likely meanings can be traced doesn't inherently imbue the movie with meaningful-ness. Its execution is often stilted, with Hal and Bill's mother gesturing towards some unifying perspective on death (or one that's unifying by virtue of not having an answer, like an attempt to grasp the great unknown). But each time the film approaches dramatic rigor, thrillss, or something of emotional value disguised by humor, it quickly pivots toward snarky meta-commentary.
Ironically, it's a film that stays true to life by being afraid to meaningfully discuss death, even as it unfolds all around its characters. This reluctance is briefly challenged in the second half when, years after disposing of the monkey, a now divorced Hal tries reconnecting with his estranged son Petey (Colin O'Brien), as the toy slowly becomes a Jungian shadow, re-emerging and coming to represent a supposed family curse of shitty fatherhood. It's here, during the introduction of this brand-new idea, that the movie is at its most intriguing, and the monkey is most potent as an embodiment of self-perpetuating guilt. However, it isn't long before The Monkey swerves into an entirely tertiary story about where Bill has been all this while, why the monkey may have returned, and why the movie's random deaths may have started up again.
Same, Tatiana Maslany.
As an extension of the aforementioned curse, this development makes perfect sense on paper, but the reveal of its bigger picture comes frustratingly late into the runtime. By this point, little ground has been tread, leaving no room for new aesthetic flourishes or conceptual transformation. Essentially: The Monkey drags itself toward a finish line, and stops to do a flip before its final crossing. Hooray.
