When people die, how the fuck do you take it? How do you deal? Sadly? Sweetly? Meekly? Do you rage at injustice, or do you just… accept it? Take it at face-value?

A lot of the time, death just doesn’t make sense. But “that’s life”, as Tatiana Maslany’s Lois Shelburn says to her two twin boys, Bill and Hal (both played by Christian Convery), in Osgood Perkins’s “new trip”, The Monkey.

 

Perkins has long been working deep in the horror vein, with prior “trips” like The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House being dark and straight-faced in their genre trappings. But past his breakout hit, last year’s Longlegs, Perkins has seemingly decided to stretch his limbs, artistically – The Monkey is, if you’re into it, a flat-out comedy. A dark, twisted, gory, delightful comedy.

And, like the best comedies, it’s wonderfully dumb. I don’t mean that as an insult, and I’m certainly not telling you to turn off your brain, or some shit. But The Monkey makes its set-ups so obvious, and artfully so, that when the punchlines come, like a Rube Goldberg of death, they’re a gory joy.

Letting “The Good Times Roll”

But what is The Monkey? The title toy itself is a little wind-up simian that drums while playing Shirley & Lee’s “Let the Good Times Roll” on a weird, distorted internal organ before the last drumstroke of the song hits and somebody, inevitably, dies. The story itself is based on a Stephen King short published in his collection Skeleton Crew, but it’s not a one-to-one adaptation – King’s original story was frightfully dark and psychological. Perkins, in crafting his very loose adaptation, has taken the old skin of the King story and stretched it over an entirely new situation and plot that doesn’t merely nod knowingly at other King stories (there are minor characters outright named “Annie Wilkes” and “Mrs. Torrance”), it whiplashes its head up-and-down as eagerly in knowingness as, well, a monkey. Perkins is having fun with his framework in making it as King-ian as possible without being entirely beholden to King’s original – if you’re a King fan, yourself, you won’t be disappointed even if you won’t be expecting the divergences. There’s even a nod to a King story I’d read and remembered as a kid, although I’ll leave which one it is exactly to myself.

Perkins tells his story in chronological order, starting from what one of the twins imagines must’ve happened to his absent father (played by a cameoing, mustachioed Adam Scott), before moving on with whiplash abruptness to the twins’ childhood, in 1999. Their single mother, Lois (Maslany), raises them in a big house; we never learn what it is she does to maintain their lifestyle, but she dances, bowls, and tells them to mind their language. Hal (Convery), who wears glasses, and Bill (also Convery), who is the older of the two by three minutes, has a different hairstyle, and bullies his twin, are constantly at low-boil odds with each other; Bill manipulates their school life in order to get Hal repeatedly bullied, to the point where Hal finally snaps. But before he does, they find that toy monkey, wind it up… and then nothing happens.

Until a little while later, when something violently does. I’m not going to detail it, because it’s the first they witness of the many delightfully dark and abrupt deaths in this movie, but it comes with a twofold lesson told: The first, a completely off-the-cuff, hilarious sermon by a young priest played by Burnaby-based Nicco del Rio; the second, being the seeming precept of the film, told over ice cream in a cemetery by Maslany’s Lois: “It’s never if. It’s only when. … Everybody dies. And that’s life.”

But, as I said up top, if everybody dies… how the fuck do you take it? Hal, despite being bullied, grows up into (our top-billed star, The White Lotus‘s Theo James) a well-adjusted deadbeat dad in a dead-end supermarket job; Bill, the bully, also grows up (also The White Lotus‘s Theo James) into a general basket-case with the ugliest haircut you’ve ever seen, money to go to strip clubs, and seemingly nothing else. In the 25 years since their childhood, they’ve hardly spoken to each other, until their Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy) has a “freak accident” (as Bill terms it) that begins with falling into a box of Christmas lights (a detail nicely retained from King’s original story) and ends with being impaled on a realtor’s sign in the middle of the night.

The adult Hal is our grimly ironical narrator (for most of the runtime); Hal, who is at the start of a planned week with his estranged son, Petey (Colin O’Brien), is dealing with life about as successfully, and grimly, as you might expect – particularly evident in the lone scene where he tolerates his wife’s second husband, a wealthy author and fatherhood guru in a big house played with delightful gusto by Elijah Wood as an obnoxious “power”-stealing boor. But, as so often happens with life, death interrupts – quite literally.

And repeatedly.

Gorily, and violently.

… as becomes very obvious very quickly, death has, as it does with all people, fucked these particular people – the particular family – right the fuck up.

And, for as dark and as obviously hard-to-deal with as death, and these deaths, are for these people, they come and hit you in ways – quite purposefully arranged by writer/director Perkins – that can only make you laugh with how absolutely fucked, gory, and matter-of-fact they come, even as they come in the more wonderfully-contrived way possible, underlined by James’s narration.

Perkins shows us each piece, each link, in the chain beforehand, then sets off the contraption and we can only guffaw in delight at the results.

Again and again – from a wasp’s nest to a completely random herd of horses (which Perkins delivers to a character played by, spoiler alert, himself) – the deaths hit with the shock of a concrete cinderblock to the head, but with way more art and style applied. There’s even a wonderful snort of an homage to Home Alone – I’m not even kidding!

It’s Like “Vertigo”

I really don’t want to overly detail the plot, because so much of the joy is in figuring it out as Perkins leads you along, showing you how each character has been fucked by each death and situation. But there’s a style and care in how the plot unravels that calls back, to my mind, to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo – maybe not the most obvious reference, but considering Perkins’s own lineage (his father, Anthony, starred in Hitchcock’s Psycho), it’s a well-considered and -appreciated one.

Perkins’s family, in real life, has had to deal with death in its various manifestations, which I’m not going to detail here, but suffice to say, his firsthand experience has been wound into the viewpoint of this film with a careful and knowing eye. Far from being gloomy and melodramatic, The Monkey has a wonderful, colorful style, and wild aplomb – rather like his own father’s Psycho III, which features not just a shower scene but a shower scene with a hallucination of a nun!

And, as with Vertigo, and as with other King tales, dreams and hallucinations and memories intertwine themselves into the twins’ viewpoints – and I mention Vertigo again because, well, you’ll know it when you see it.

A kaleidoscope one moment, a blaze of primary color out of black night the next – it’s not as playful with aspect ratios as Longlegs was, but there’s a Bible quote repeatedly in the dialogue that I initially thought was Perkins playing in that same rhetorical sandbox of theology again – but I found myself completely, wonderfully, and gloriously wrong, in the most literal way. When you see it, you’ll know.

It’s So Fun

How literal this film gets contributes, I think, to how wonderfully the comedy plays; in part, because of how realistically stupid its characters act, like actual human beings do. A character that winds up looming large, Ricky, played by Rohan Campbell (from Halloween Ends), is so incredibly dumb that he convolutes the plot even further, just by dint of how stupid he is, and he’s so stupid he makes you laugh every time he’s on screen.

His eyes are never visible under his wild mane of ’80s-rock-style hair (and, indeed, some of the hairstyles in this film weirdly seem to place this in a period earlier than it appears to actually be set, but that might just be part of the charm), further showing his dimness to the whole thing – he’s seemingly the only main character who doesn’t realize the monkey is killing people; instead, he’s reminded of his own absent father by the killer monkey. It’s so, so dumb, and that’s why it’s glorious.

But the story’s not thoughtlessly dumb; no, it’s got a very smart point. Perkins has stretched the skin of the original King story over a structure roughly the shape of a metallic horse skeleton – a shaggy whip on one end, a long trailing back, arcing to a keenly intelligent and jaded view of life and death. And, obviously, like a horse, shit generally comes out one end, and you have to deal with that. That’s not Perkins’s point, but if you follow the structure of the film, you’ll arguably follow the point he’s making better.

In a dual role, our lead, Theo James, differentiates enough between Bill and Hal – they are brothers, after all – while keeping a cool, level, natural affect for both that only cracks when it really sells to us that it is even more serious. James is the only Brit in the cast, but you’d never guess from how utterly American his accent is – it’s without a hitch, and really plays nicely into some of the weirder lines both brothers have to say. And the dark irony his ever-present, Goodfellas/Jules et Jim-style narration is drenched in, is perfect for the gory, weird shit both characters wind up dealing with.

Canadian Pros

The young Bill and Hal are also both played by a single actor, Christian Convery, and he gives one of the best child actor performances I’ve seen since Grey House on Broadway back in 2023. He sells the emotional moments; he carries you right up to his end of the plot with both characters, and helps differentiate between the two brothers in even more obvious ways than James does, but neither performance is showy. Convery, a young Canadian previously from the series Sweet Tooth, is a remarkable talent, as is the young American Colin O’Brien, who plays Hal’s son Petey – James and O’Brien don’t look very related, but Convery and O’Brien do, and James and O’Brien, carrying the bulk of the runtime together, play so well off each other that you really want to see more of them together as a duo.

But the film is full of great supporting performances, from a majority Canadian cast – the film was shot in Vancouver, after all. Levy, del Rio, and Campbell all shine; Janet Kidder, a Canadian screen legend, also makes an appearance. In particular, there’s a scene-stealing turn given by the prominently-billed Canadian farceur Tess Degenstein as Aunt Ida’s realtor – she’s, as far as I know, not gotten too many major films before, so this is easily her moment; her shot. (Pun intended. Wait for it.)

And shot after shot is called by Perkins, like a demented Babe Ruth, bat smeared with gore – the obvious comparison I’ve seen to this is Final Destination, but while that series plays its plots seriously with its deaths being contrived and wildly out of the ordinary, to the point of utilizing scads of spectacular CGI, The Monkey sets up its deaths so matter-of-factly, albeit with a sophisticated visual style, that when they do come – and some of them take a while to come – they land wonderfully, not horribly, like the sudden shock of a brick joke jolting you to remember the set-up long after it’s been wound up. The most comically out-of-place moments, like a squad of cheerleaders cheering on the removal of a body from a crime scene – seriously – don’t even feel out-of-place; they come as part of the weird, wonderful comedy; they land like even-gorier bits out of a 2000s Farrelly Brothers movie, delivered with pitch-black humor and out one end of a glorious, glossy, sophisticated machine. It’s Perkins applying the style he’s been developing since his very first film, the style that earned him such wild acclaim in Longlegs, to a pitch-perfect application of bathos in the face of horror — you really can only laugh. It’s wonderful.

And just as wonderful is the brief, recurring figure of the twins’ mother, Lois. Maslany, despite being second-billed, right under Theo James, is barely in the film, but you can’t forget her impact, her sheer presence, in the story; she looms large, like the mother in a Grimm fairy tale, or Struwwelpeter, briefly glimpsed, shaded in, full of import, and then lingering in her absence – like a reverse Harry Lime in The Third Man. As I said, we never get to see what Lois Shelburn does in life – except, from the boys’ perspective, dance. And Maslany dances. Perkins has an incredible eye for talent, and Maslany, one of the best actresses of her generation (if you’ve seen She-Hulk and Orphan Black, you fucking know), uses her screentime to utmost advantage; one wonders which came first, The Monkey or Perkins’s next announced feature, Keeper, which is already completed – begun during the double SAG/WGA strike – to result in Maslany being in Perkins’s top-and-near-top-billed spots for both films. (If you stick past the end credits, as I did, you will see a delightful, brief teaser for Keeper, so I recommend doing so.)

Perkins not only has a remarkable eye, he’s got an incredible ear for music – Longlegs, for example, proved just how studious a fan of T. Rex he was, and in The Monkey, he dives deep into ’60s rock ‘n’ roll for his soundtrack – easily the most King-ian of musical settings. Not just Shirley & Lee, but also Sam Cooke as the finishing blow, which just puts a viewer in mind (as one can only assume Perkins meant to put the viewer in mind) of one name, one appellation: Landis. If that’s the sort of influence Perkins is proudly wearing on his sleeve, I really can’t wait to see what else – and not just Keeper! — he’s got in reserve.

Now Playing

At 98 minutes in length, The Monkey trots at a breezy canter most films these days can only dream of, and I urge you to see it more than once, not just because it’s short, but because it’s fun. We need more fun, these days.

The Monkey, released by NEON, is in theatres almost worldwide now. Directed and written by Osgood Perkins. Produced by James Wan. Starring Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell, Tess Degenstein, with Sarah Levy, Osgood Perkins, Adam Scott, and Elijah Wood. Runtime: 98 minutes. Rated R.