Review: The Monkey (2025)

The Monkey (2025)

Rated R for strong bloody violent content, gore, language throughout and some sexual references

Score: 4 out of 5

The Monkey is the Stephen King version of a Final Destination movie. It's a movie that's all about creative and gory death scenes in which a lot of the appeal is less about being scared and more about figuring out how they're gonna be able to top the last one, a film that feels like it was made knowing that one of the biggest horror channels on YouTube, Dead Meat, has as its main attraction a show called The Kill Count where they catalogue deaths in horror movies and then go into detail on their production. But whereas the Final Destination films all take themselves fairly seriously and try to make the death scenes scary even if there is on some level a winking acknowledgement of how ridiculous it can get, The Monkey is infused with the particular kind of black comedy that King's writing frequently indulges in. It's not the lighthearted humor that I often associate with horror-comedies, but rather, a sort of blue-collar gallows humor, like you're chatting with your friend at work or a bar about how some guy you knew died in a spectacularly fucked-up way that you both can't help but laugh at. Underneath its story about jealousy and family tensions boiling over, this is fundamentally a movie about how we're all gonna die, because that's just the way life is. I mean, the tagline on the poster is literally "everybody dies, and that's fucked up." It's a dark and nihilistic movie, to be sure, but rather than force viewers to stare into an abyss of misery and despair, writer/director Osgood Perkins instead makes one big cosmic joke out of it, one that comes courtesy of a great cast and a great story that, in true King fashion, is all about how human beings can be some of the biggest monsters of all. It's an offbeat but very fun movie that feels made for horror fans, and if you count yourself as such, I recommend checking it out.

The film's titular villain is a mechanical organ grinder monkey with a curse attached to it. You see, every time it is wound up and plays its song, somebody nearby inevitably dies. The more brutal the death, the better. It also seemingly has the ability to teleport and put itself back together after sustaining damage, meaning it can't be easily destroyed or dumped at the bottom of a well, as the film's protagonists, the twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn, attempted to do when they were kids who watched a bunch of people close to them die after they played around with it and eventually realized what was going on. The monkey is a scary-looking motherfucker, and the damage it deals makes up the film's big horror set pieces, with a whole bunch of victims who seem like they're made of plasticine as they get dismembered, maimed, and mutilated by everything from a hibachi knife to a harpoon gun to a bowling ball to a swimming pool. While some of the deaths are meant to be tragic, many more are explicitly designed to make viewers laugh their asses off at the ridiculous circumstances involved, like a feature-length episode of 1000 Ways to Die where you just wanna see how ridiculous they get, and this film did indeed make me laugh my ass off at the gratuitous violence it proudly threw up in my face. It is a bloody joyride of a movie from start to finish, using gory deaths as punchlines the way the Farrelly Brothers or Judd Apatow would use sex jokes, and the deaths are very well done in everything from the effects work to the effect they have on me watching them.

And that effect was a grim one underneath the laughs and the yuks. Make no mistake, while this is a horror-comedy, the comedy is in the blackest sense of the term, establishing a bleak and nihilistic tone in which life is just one big joke before we all die. Again, read the tagline: "everybody dies, and that's fucked up." Moreover, it's less the gleeful nihilism of, say, an Eli Roth movie, in which terrible things happen to terrible people and we cheer for them getting what they deserve, and more the world-weary kind of somebody who's seen it all, knows just how sick and depraved people and life in general can be, and can't help but laugh at it because there's not much else you can do. The film ends with the surviving protagonists resigned to the fact that they are never going to fully rid themselves of the evil in their lives, and can only manage it going forward and try to keep anybody else from trying to use it for ill. (And then ending on one last gory gag, just because.) It is a dark movie with a lot going on beneath the surface, and it would not have worked as well as it did without Theo James playing both of its leads. James is an actor I only ever knew as a pretty boy thanks to the Divergent movies, but here, he's a mile away from a YA dystopia, playing a pair of twin brothers with opposite personalities who have both deeply resented each other since they were kids and clearly don't like having to come back together again to defeat the evil from their childhood. This movie is stacked with great actors in small but memorable parts, from Tatiana Maslany and Adam Scott as Hal and Bill's parents to Elijah Wood as the new husband of Hal's ex-wife to Christian Convery playing the same double act as the younger versions of Hal and Bill in the first act, but it's James who carries the film on his shoulders and makes Hal and Bill into a pair of protagonists who I found myself rooting for and buying as two very different guys.

Behind the camera, the film's writer/director Osgood Perkins continues the hot streak he started last year with Longlegs with a movie that couldn't be more different from it in terms of tone. Perkins has proven himself to be a rising star of a horror filmmaker, proving that he can tackle not only a grim psychological thriller with minimal gore but also a darkly comic bloodbath like this one. It's his work that makes this such a damn funny movie at times, showing us all the ridiculousness in both Hal and Bill's normal lives and that which the monkey forces them into, a tone that had to walk a fine line but which Perkins nails. A synopsis of the original Stephen King short story suggests that a lot of this movie's plot, especially the relationship between the brothers, was Perkins' idea, and the fact that he managed to make something that felt so true to what I know of King's writing style puts him up there with Mike Flanagan in the ranks of filmmakers who I would trust, sight unseen, with any adaptation of King's work. This guy has a long career in horror ahead of him, and I'm eagerly anticipating what he has in store next.

The Bottom Line

There isn't really much to say about this one, except that it's probably gonna be one of my favorite films of 2025. It's not perfect, but it manages to nail the sweet spot between being too cartoonish and flippant on one hand and too grim and dour on the other. It's a hell of a treat for horror fans that I can see myself going back to.