A followup to the maniacal hit Longlegs (2024), Osgood Perkins pits lead Theo James against the titular musical toy monkey, embracing its bizarro nature with enough self-awareness to be thoroughly entertaining. With sadistically comedic, over-the-top kills and foreboding sense of inevitable dread, Osgood twists the Final Destination attitude towards the hopeless inevitability of death – be it by collapsing rollercoaster or exploding suntan bed – by instead embracing life while accepting deaths conclusion, albeit at the paws of a maleficent wind-up monkey.
Everybody dies. Some of us peacefully and in our sleep, and some of us… horribly. And that’s just life.
When twin brothers (Theo James twice over as Hal and Bill Shelburn) inherit a wind-up toy monkey after their father’s disappearance, it is quickly made apparent that the creepy little cymbal-crashing – or due to copyright reasons, drumming – menace has passed on a curse that quickly racks up quite the bodycount. Often in spectacularly creative fashion, at that. An adaptation of the Stephen King short story based on the infamous parable, Osgood Perkins infuses the monkey’s paw fable with a sense of inescapable dread and inevitability with goofy charm and quirky humour that makes it comically entertaining without skimping on the tension. Where Perkins sustained an innately creepy atmosphere through Longlegs, thanks in no small part to Nicholas Cage’s characteristically unhinged performance, The Monkey beats a different tune with its menacing little drum, using the rhythmic beat to mark someone’s gruesome, imminent end, suspensefully leaving you to wait and see who and how.
Malevolent toys are a not unfamiliar horror trope in cinema, invoking a kind of corrupted youth and tainted innocence. That and James Wan’s ventriloquist dolls are plain creepy one way or the other (see Deadly Silence or Annabelle). In the case of Hal and Bill, we are presented with twin brothers dealing with generational trauma represented by a cursed family inheritance that just so happens to mark death for those around them. There’s a fundamentally intricate genre mechanic at play in The Monkey that seems more personal when considering the tragic family history surrounding the film’s director: the death of his father, Anthony Perkins, from Aids-related pneumonia in 1992, and his mother, Berry Berenson, a passenger on the hijacked 9/11 flight. In this regard, we are invited to see death as indiscriminate and inevitable, however even with this morbid reflection on the fragility of mortality and the unknown, Perkins finds a way to inject a lightheartedness to the picture, as if to embrace the inevitable.
The monkey that likes killing our family, it’s back.
A through-line concerning parental abandonment and grief is joined with absurdly dark, near parody moments of horror at the hands of a wind-up toy, one deceptively less than playful and rather more indiscriminately evil. People are skewered, decapitated, exploded and everything in-between in a manner so over-the-top it’ll tease your sadistic side out and leave you grinning like the monkey on the poster the whole way through.
