The Monkey Review: Monkey Business Macabre Mischief With Theo James, Elijah Wood, And Tatiana Maslany

Title: The Monkey

Director: Oz Perkins

Cast: Theo James, Elijah Wood, Tatiana Maslany, Rohan Campbell, Christian Convery, Sarah Levy, Adam Scott

Where: In theatres near you

Rating: 3 Stars

The Monkey, Osgood Perkins’ latest dive into horror, plays like a child’s nightmare scribbled in dark ink—half haunted tale, half grim joke. Adapted from Stephen King’s short story, the film turns a seemingly innocuous wind-up toy into a harbinger of absurdly grotesque deaths, delivered with the giddy flair of a magician pulling knives from a hat.

Twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn (both played as children by Christian Convery) stumble upon the titular monkey in their father’s belongings—a mechanical organ grinder that claps its tiny cymbals with malevolent precision. Every time it does, someone in their orbit meets an untimely, often ludicrously violent demise. They manage to ditch it, but like all good curses- it has a habit of boomeranging back. Decades later, an adult Hal (Theo James) finds himself once again in the monkey’s orbit, grappling with his estranged brother, his own neglected son, and the nagging sense that fate, like a bad joke, is repeating itself.

Perkins, fresh off the success of Longlegs, wields his darkly comic sensibilities like a scalpel, cutting between supernatural horror, macabre family drama, and outright farce. The film leans into absurdism, fashioning its deaths as punchlines rather than gut punches. The film’s DNA seems spliced from Final Destination’s elaborate death traps and Gremlins’ chaotic mischief, producing moments that are at once repulsive and hysterical. When Perkins gets the balance right, it’s an intoxicating mix. When he doesn’t, the tonal shifts feel less like seamless transitions and more like hard jolts, leaving the film wobbling between campy spectacle and attempted profundity.

James, tasked with carrying much of the film’s emotional weight, plays Hal as a man adrift, his hands in his pockets, his gaze heavy with dread. The film seems to get a kick out of making him look like the only competent man in a world populated by the clueless and the doomed. His brother Bill, by contrast, exists mostly as a sneering foil, never quite escaping the caricature of a childhood bully grown up. The most striking presence, however, belongs to Tatiana Maslany as their weary mother, Lois. She delivers the film’s thematic thesis with a bitter monologue about the inevitability of death—less a comforting truth than a grim inevitability.

For all its inventiveness, The Monkey isn’t immune to fatigue. The middle act, tasked with stringing together the past and present, stalls just when it should be tightening its grip. Deaths keep coming, each one more theatrically unhinged than the last, but the momentum wavers, as if the film itself is unsure whether to keep spinning its wheels or barrel forward. The climax, when it arrives, lands somewhere between clever and self-sabotaging, toeing the line between a satisfying resolution and a winking refusal to play by conventional horror rules.

Perkins, ever the provocateur, refuses to give the film a convenient origin story. It simply is—a malevolent force with no explanation, no motive, just an inexorable drive to drum its way through another hapless soul’s life. Perhaps that’s the point: death, like a wind-up toy, doesn’t need a reason to keep going.