Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for The Monkey.
Osgood Perkinshas a thing for reminding us that life doesn’t care about our human connections. Be itdemonic possession, grief-driven witchcraft, or just plain bad luck,characters in Perkins' world often struggle to find the good things in life when the bad stuff torrentially pours down on them. This has never been more apparent than in his new film,The Monkey, a movie so comfortable with humanity being crushed on a regular basis that it fully commits to being a slapstick comedy yet still maintaining a sincere emotional grounding in its central plot.It makes for the most entertaining film he’s made yet, as he snatches hope from the jaws of nihilism and has so much fun doing it — and the movie’s finale is a perfect representation of that.
‘The Monkey’ Wreaks Havoc Wherever It Goes
Hal and Bill (Christian Convery) are identical twins who, while only young teens,have spent their lives so far surrounded by misfortune and misery. With a father who abandoned them (Adam Scott) and a mother (Tatiana Maslany) who seems to be a functioning alcoholic with a fixation on the unfairness of life, they have to depend on each other for emotional stability. That’s easier said than donesince Bill is an overt bully who constantly forces the passive and timid Hal to be his doormat.
When the pair goes through their Dad’s things,they find a mechanical toy monkey that kills people in extremely gory fashion when its key gets turned. The monkey itself doesn’t get its hands dirty, but it has the power to cause deaths through freak accidents, like a chef in a teppanyaki restaurant accidentally slicing a diner’s neck with a sharp knife. When Hal attempts to use the monkey to kill Bill,it kills their mom instead,which causes an irreparable rift between the twins. Hal attempts to destroy the monkey, only for it to reappear repaired, so the twins lock it up and throw it down a well before permanently parting ways into their adulthood.
Hal Is Doomed to Repeat His Father’s Behavior
Decades pass, and nowHal (Theo James) is a total social hermit, looking to distance himself from everyoneout of fear of the monkey striking against anyone he loves. He’s stuck in a dead-end convenience store job and has a very strained relationship with his son, Petey (Colin O’Brien). This is the last chance Hal has to be a good father to Petey, as he’s on the brink of losing his parental rights to his wife’s new partner, a wannabe self-help guru named Ted (Elijah Wood).
In a cruel repeat of the past, Hal is on the brink of abandoning his family the way his father did, but seeing how terrified his dad was in trying to ditch the monkey,we understand how far Hal has to go to protect his son.Plus, it’s his distancing himself from Petey that causes his son to hate him so much, being only able to see him as an inconsiderate deadbeat, since he doesn’t know anything about Hal’s family history.It ties into the theme of the monkey as a metaphor for the unfairness of lifeand continues Perkins' fixation on how parents' efforts to protect their children can wind up doing just as much harm to them.
The Stephen King Adaptation ‘The Monkey’ Scores a Bloody Good Rotten Tomatoes Score
Osgood Perkins’s much-anticipated Stephen King adaptation hits theaters on February 21.
Meanwhile, a rebel named Thrasher (Rohan Campbell) is perusing a garage sale and finds…the monkey. To quotea calamitous disappointment: somehow, the monkey returned. Even Thrasher’s storyline continues the thread of familial disconnect and inadequate fatherhood, as he comes from a broken home with a cheating dad and a constant undertone of tension with his mom and brother. His curiosity gets the better of him, and he turns the key, which ends up killing Hal’s aunt Ida (Sarah Levy) in an excruciating death scene.
When Hal and Petey are on a road trip, Hal gets a call from his long-separated brother Bill (James).Bill tells him that he suspects that the monkey has come back and that Hal needs to find it and bring it to him, which Hal finds easy to believe. Hal questions why Bill can’t just find the monkey himself, but Bill brazenly hangs up before giving an answer. It’s all quite suspicious, and here’s where the tables turn and we get the full picture.
The Broken Connection Between the Twins is the Narrative Heart of the Movie
This doesn’t come as much of a shock for a film that finds its heart in the tension between toxic family bonds, but it turns out thatBill is the one responsible for the monkey’s grand return. Bill long suspected that Hal was the one who killed their mom, and he has spent his years since childhood traumatized from the events. He has never forgiven Hal and plotted his revenge by finding the monkey where they left it and letting it loose in the world in the hopes it would find Hal. As Bill grew older, he developed a zealous belief in the monkey as a righteous arbiter of justice, convinced that in order to get what he wanted, the monkey must be used by him.
Hal and Petey manage to track down Bill by finding the phone number and address for “Mrs. Monkey” (a mocking phrase Bill called Hal as a kid) in the phone book. DespiteThe Monkey’s reverence for yucky chaos and Rube Goldberg-inspired wacky morbidity,it’s the broken heart shared between Hal and Bill that’s the backbone of the narrative, and seeing them finally try to fix it serves as much-needed catharsis… well, almost.
‘The Monkey’ Ends With Both Tragedy and Hope
Bill explains his elaborate conviction to Hal, insisting thathe believes the monkey will never kill whoever turns the key. Hal refuses, and Bill then suggests letting Petey turn the key, claiming that it ensures Petey will not be harmed. Hal isn’t having it, trying repeatedly to break through to Bill and convince him that none of this was worth it. Wounded and backed into a corner, Bill is finally touched by Hal’s belief in his better nature, and the two finally make amends witha brotastic handshake. Butthe monkey goes off, and a cannonball crashes through Bill’s head, courtesy of his own elaborate trap meant to stop intruders. The image of Theo James' face meat pulped into a wall is one you may’t get out of your head, especially since it unintentionally reminded me of the final image ofDemi Moore’s sludge face inThe Substance, which only makes it funnier.
With Bill dead,Hal decides that the best course of action is to take ownership of the monkeyand make sure it remains locked away from everyone else, never to be used again. Shaken and dismayed but emotionally reunited asfather and son, Hal and Petey leave the building, driving off and witnessing a myriad of carnage that the monkey left in its wake, like a baby carriage on fire and a man impaled on a tree with a surfboard.This chaos was caused by Bill repeatedly twisting the monkey’s key over and over, desperately trying to kill Hal.He put his traumatized needs before any sense of solidarity and destroyed the nearby community in the process, a fitting metaphor not just for how damaging unhealthy family bonds can be, but a chilling evocation of our current political climate.
Before Hal and Petey can drive off into the sunset, Hal witnesses an old pale woman in a tattered dark cloak riding a horse, referencing a vision that Hal obsessively mentions multiple times throughout the film. Whether she actually exists or is merely one of the supernatural ways in which the monkey messes with Hal’s psyche is part of the queasy uneasiness about the unknowability of life’s mysteries. Hal suggests taking Petey to a public attraction, which Petey surprisingly agrees to, and they drive away as a bus full of cheerleaders is sideswiped by a truck, leaving a bloody mess. It’s a perfect note to end on, one that asserts the central thesis thatthe monkey really is “like life,“as the box it’s stored in is labeled: cruel, without meaning or explanation, and somehow capable of inspiring irreverent glee and just enough of a tiny shred of hope to keep us going.
The Monkeyis in theaters now.
The Monkey
The Monkey is based on Stephen King’s 1980 short story of the same name. The plot follows twin brothers Hal and Bill, played by Theo James and Christian Convery, who discover a cursed monkey toy in their father’s attic. The toy is linked to a series of gruesome deaths, forcing the brothers to confront its dark power years later.
