The Monkey Review

The Monkey is a darkly comic offering from the pantheon of Stephen King adaptations. This film is the follow-up of Osgood Perkins’ sleeper hit, Longlegs.

In 1999 twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn (Christian Convery/Theo James) find a toy monkey amongst their father’s possessions. When the boys use The Monkey people they know die and they resolve to get rid of it. 25 years later The Monkey reappears, leading to strange deaths happening in a small town in Maine. Bill tasks Hal to find The Monkey before more deaths occur.

The Monkey had an eclectic team behind it and the marketing team highlighted this. Perkins is the golden boy of horror because of Longlegs, King’s adaptations wildly vary in quality, and James Wan, a master of mainstream horror films acted as producer. Even the companies behind the film were eclectic since it was distributed by Neon, and the production companies included Black Bear and Wan’s company Atomic Monster. What was delivered was a wildly entertaining film with some substance.

The Monkey was a film that had a jet-black sense of humour. This was evident with the film’s opening scene which involved a spear gun and a flamethrower. This was a film that had hilarious and elaborate deaths: bodies were exploding and there were Rube Goldberg Machines of death. It played like an extra violent version of a Final Destination movie.  Gorehounds will love this movie.

Even when death wasn’t on screen, it was still present in the humour. Some characters were fascinated about death, others asked awkward questions, and a priest acted inappropriately at a funeral. There were a lot of funny lines and exchanges that made The Monkey a dark delight. The large amount of death also led to The Monkey having a nihilistic viewpoint about life, death, and fate.

The thematic throughline involved generational trauma. The twins inherited The Monkey from their father who they believed had abandoned them, and their childhood trauma affected them to adulthood. Hal had no friends and little contact with his family. Hal only sees his son, Petey (Colin O’Brien) once a year because of The Monkey. This caused a rift between father and son, and due to Petey’s upcoming adoption by his stepfather, Hal and Petey were made to spend time together. This led Petey to get to know more about the dad he never knew. The father abandonment theme extended to the side character of Ricky (Rohan Campbell), who was abandoned by his cop father.

Familial trauma has been a theme present in other works by Stephen King. Carrie was about a girl who had an abusive fundamentalist mother, and the Kubrick version of The Shining showed Jack Torrance having disdain for his own family. Doctor Sleep was a sequel to The Shining which showed Danny having to deal with the trauma of surviving the incident at the Overlook Hotel and how he had to overcome it.

Many King adaptations do have tropes and some were present in The Monkey. Most of the film took place in Maine, like many King stories. They were also psychopaths making the main character’s life hell. The Monkey does play around with this trope by making the bully one of the main characters: Bill. Bill was horrific to his twin since he dominated and belittled his slightly younger brother. He made Hal’s life a misery at home and school, leading to the younger version of Hal taking some dark and desperate actions. Bill displayed sociopathic tendencies that made him just as worrying as the demonic toy.

The Monkey was a blast of a film because of its dark humour and expressive violence that was short and breezy, whilst also being a thematic horror-comedy.