The Monkey
Rating: 5/5
By: Nathaniel Simpson
Osgood Perkins is on a roll. After releasing the widely popular film Longlegs (which is without a doubt in my top 3 of last year), he follows it up with another horror film, this time written by the great Stephen King and produced by horror legend James Wan. The Monkey not only shows how great of a filmmaker Perkins truly is, but how he does such an excellent job of blending together horror with dark comedy.
The film tells the story of two twin brothers, Hal and Bill Shelburn (Christian Convery as the younger versions of the twins, Theo James as the older versions) who find an old monkey toy in their father's closet years after he abandoned the family. When they think it is just an innocent childhood toy, things take a turn for the worst as the Monkey has some sort of power to choose and kill people close to the person who winds it up. When too many people start dying around the young boys, they decide to throw the Monkey down a well and hope he never appears again.
Now twenty-five years later, the Monkey has made an appearance again and killing those around Hal, who is trying to have one last good week with his estranged son (Colin O'Brien) before he possibly loses him forever. What he doesn't realize is that there is a more sinister plot going on, and it's up to him to be the one that stops the Monkey for good.
From beginning to end, this film is tons of fun and absolutely hilarious. He has stated that this is his most personal film, and you can see how much care he has taken into telling this story and translating it onto the silver screen. Perkins demonstrates how he understands how to make horror absolutely hilarious at times, and he utilizes his actors in such a great way throughout the movie. Each actor really fits their part and really embodies the characters they play, and Perkins masterfully crafts this film to give each character their own spotlight.
The graphic, gory deaths that Perkins has in his film are simply amazing. He has said before he wanted the deaths in this movie to feel like they couldn't happen in real life, and over-exaggerate them. He did a great job of doing that, with deaths that are more humorous and unsuspecting than those that would work on a more horror level. It is obvious Perkins is having tons of fun making this movie and crafting this absurd story off of King's short story, and it works so well and is so damn fun.
James is excellent in this role, and really shows off a side of him we have never seen. We have seen him play a brooding loner in Divergent, an eccentric womanizer in The White Lotus, and an aristocrat in The Gentlemen TV series. But, we finally see him as a nerdy loner who is usually down on his luck and, for lack of a better term, a loser. He also plays a twin version of himself, but I won't spoil that for you here. Both performances he gives as the twin brothers are so much fun and so uniquely different that they're quite easy to tell apart, which is usually hard for actors to do when playing two different characters. I really enjoyed James here, and this may be one of my favorite performances from him.
The rest of the cast does such a great job in this absurd, wacky world. Tatiana Maslany, Rohan Campbell, Elijah Wood, Colin O'Brien, and even Perkins himself (for a small role) are all so much fun and each character really adds something to the film as a whole. There aren't many major characters here, so all of the ones here leave an imprint on the film as the credits roll. I especially love the chemistry between O'Brien and James as the father-son duo, and Campbell gives such a bizarre and out-there performance that works so well.
Perkins is easily establishing himself as one of the directors to watch, and is already a fantastic director in the horror community. He is one of my favorite directors working today, and The Monkey perfectly shows how Perkins is a master at telling stories like this. With his next film already coming out this October, I think Perkins is going to be considered one of the greats, along the likes of directors who have left their mark on the filmmaking world.
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