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A Morbid Barrel of Monkeys

If it is in any way accurate to its source material, Monkey is Stephen King’s Final Destination -which seems like such an odd thing. A story that is very gleeful about every death, about every moment of violence and the attitude of its characters seem to reflect that sense of observational absurdity. It’s certainly quite different in tone from a lot of King horror stories we’re familiar with, not to mention the work of director Osgood Perkins, who only really came onto the scene as a filmmaker last year with his movie Longlegs. Where that was a movie that tried hard to feel like a classic and serious serial killer film, this one has not an ounce of seriousness in it. And the fun Perkins has with it resonates, even if the movie on a whole is another mixed bag.
The film revolves around a stuffed toy monkey with terrifying globe eyes and what look to be real human teeth (and there is never an attempt to pacify this, everyone is at least mildly freaked out by it). Turning the key in its back results in it playing a little song and hitting its drums, but always with it comes a freak and violent accident to someone other than the person who turned the key. What’s more, the monkey seemingly cannot be destroyed, as Adam Scott’s pilot Petey Shelburn, and later his son Hal realize when they make the attempt.
The Monkey comes to haunt the lives of Petey's children, twins Hal and Bill (played as kids by Christian Convery, as adults by Theo James), especially after one of its victims is their mother Lois (Tatiana Maslany), already a fairly morbid person. They cannot escape it, only bear witness to the dead left behind, as they eventually develop divergent relationships to the accursed thing.
And it is with a very twisted attitude that Perkins depicts these deaths, almost all of which are patently absurd -from a woman being accidentally beheaded by a performance chef to a guy being attacked by a nest full of hornets to a realtor exploded by a shotgun booby trap. The violence is maniacal and often quite ludicrous as Perkins delights in his own brand of demystifying death, a major theme of the movie. The outrageous indignity of the kills strikes an unmistakably mocking tone that is there too in the spaces between violence as well, not always hitting that balance between sharp and obnoxious.
It is most evident in the borderline sociopathic cruelty of Bill towards Hal and Hal's beleaguered meekness in the face of it. As someone quite familiar with the meanness of brothers towards each other, this dynamic is very bizarre -both in terms of the needlessness of Bill's abuses and Hal's strange sense of Stockholm Syndrome. What Perkins is going for is understandably a heightened reality (his opening scene ends with Adam Scott and a flamethrower), and I'm not sure how much of this derives from King's original work, but while there is humour in this relationship and future Hal's commentary on it, it's not so pointed as it thinks and the tone Perkins is attempting to strike feels off.
That is true for a lot of the movie's sensibility on the whole. Its cheeky attitude and ridiculously macabre tendencies are certainly distinct. Sporadically the movie can be very amusing and biting -and James playing very against type as either of these characters can be a lot of fun with the wry material. But there's a certain smugness that comes from a lot of this kind of shock horror/humour, coloured by nihilistic cynicism that very easily becomes dreary and opaque -the master of it is of course Adam McKay. Perkins doesn’t go so far as that, he has no active loathing of his audience, but there is a vaguely mean-spirited and awkward bent to some of the writing. It is such a movie sapped of sincerity that no motivating emotions, particularly those from the twins, has any real value. There is some effort towards Hal as an adult to make him resonate, notably an estranged relationship with his son Petey (Colin O’Brien) to whom he both desires closeness and views himself as a bad omen; but it doesn’t connect, and feels interchangeable with any number of other Stephen King character arcs.
Aspects of the story certainly don’t hide the King origins, and in fact suggest the work is one of his lesser efforts. Though this story was published before It, the notable similarities in the story being divided between childhood and adulthood and centering on two attempts to thwart a dangerous, implicitly supernatural entity twenty-five years apart (not to mention a protagonist called Bill) are hard to ignore. There’s also obviously the Maine setting and even a babysitter -one of the Monkey’s first victims- winkingly called Annie Wilkes. King is a brand unto himself and Perkins seems to both want to play into that and chart his own path. The outcome is a bit of a strange homunculus that can feel like a parody of Stephen King in some moments.
The Monkey is not an especially scary movie, much as it does a fine job of doling out suspense -all of its traditional scares are undercut by the humour of how they are executed -though that very much seems to be the point. Perkins's love of his own dark comic instincts is very tangible and makes for some moments of fun. The way he molds his horror aesthetics and visual tendencies of the genre for this purpose gives the impression of almost a reverse Jordan Peele -though evidently less inspired. Still, it is curious, and I wonder if he will stay on this track. Incidentally, he gives himself a minor role as a deadpan Elvis-looking uncle who takes the twins in shortly before being knocked off.
Perkins has made a broadly entertaining movie, but also something of a tired and numbing one. Horror kind of requires death and the fear of death to really work, and this movie at no point takes death remotely seriously. It has two typically emotional beats associated with death, but ultimately plays them both off as jokes. There's nothing to invest in, all it has going for it is some shock and creativity and decently modulated sarcasm. That novelty isn't for nothing, but it doesn't make The Monkey so potent a force as its titular cursed amusement.

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