Whether Osgood Perkins' The Monkey works for you depends on what you expect from the film. Expect scares and terror, you are in for disappointment. If you are looking for mindless fun, The Monkey has you covered. Based on Stephen King's short story of the same name, the film begins with the death of Petey Shelburn (Adam Scott), following which the twin brothers Hal and Bill (Theo James) discover this malevolent monkey toy in his attic. The boys later learn that someone will die when the monkey stops beating the drum after its key gets turned on. The Monkey revolves around the tragedies that await the brothers after the discovery and how well they are prepared to face the pandora's box they just opened.

Osgood has tweaked King's story in more than one way. The most significant change is shifting the tone from psychological horror to absurdist humour. The film doesn't take itself too seriously. We tend to anticipate how innovative and gory the next death will be. The scenes are developed in such a way that it merely exists as a lead-up to the next death. But that was never enough to get swept away by. Osgood introduces several spaces where the film could have been subliminal and offered more excitement. The brother feud, Hal's failing marriage and the broken relationship with his son Petey. Named after his grandfather, Petey carries the generational trauma of untimely deaths in the family. Hal takes Petey back to his native Casco, where it all starts, to break this generational curse. A film with such concepts needed to have a character structure and some deep character interactions. We get none. The ties between the characters are unbearably flaky and bone-dry. Apart from a few lines of exposition, the characters do not pass on to us the sense of disappointment, the pain of failure, aloofness, and paranoia they claim to feel, and make us empathise with them.

Cast: Theo James, Christian Convery, Tatiana Maslany, Colin O'Brien
Director: Osgood Perkins

Take the director's previous film Longlegs, for instance, the film is more or less on the lines of this one. Dolls with evil spells cast in them that inflict murderous rage in families in Longlegs. In The Monkey, the omnipotent doll in some unexplained way exercises control over external objects, making it a murder weapon against those it randomly chooses. The 2024 film too had a traumatised Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) as the protagonist with a poor childhood. With all its flaws, the film focuses on the strained mother-daughter bond and a poetic arc to Harker, who becomes an FBI agent, with her childhood exposure to black magic and devil worship helping her get to Longlegs. Her solving the case also would have acted as a closure to her childhood trauma. There are many such opportunities in The Monkey. Shockingly, none of them are utilised. Bill hates Hal for no reason, he doesn't defend his twin brother when he is bullied at school, and worse, he even wants him to die when they are grown up. We aren't quite able to comprehend why both are how they are as there is not a single incident or a compelling reason to that end. It barely takes two minutes to talk Bill out of the hatred he nursed for his brother since childhood. The film, on several occasions, keeps emphasising that death is inevitable for everyone at some point in time and it has to be accepted. This undercurrent doesn't connect in a film that derives comedy out of deaths.

Despite its flaws, The Monkey stays true to its promises—creative, absurd, and often hilarious death sequences that keep the film engaging. The killings are staged with an inventive flair that turns them into a twisted spectacle. This awestruck at the gore and people helplessly submitting to death was momentary, as the scenes in between such deaths are flabby. Osgood Perkins fully embraces the ridiculousness of his premise, and in that regard, the film works. However, once the credits roll, none of the characters linger in our minds. Their conflicts are undercooked, their relationships feel hollow, and their arcs never quite land. Ultimately, The Monkey is a film that thrives on its playful absurdity but leaves nothing behind except the memory of its outlandish kills.