Osgood Perkins is having fun these days. And you know what? He’s earned it. One of the more interesting horror directors to emerge in the last decade, Perkins finally had his mainstream breakthrough last year by writing and helming the surprise indie curio of the summer: Longlegs, an achingly bleak movie about the things the Devil, and your parents, make you do.
With his follow-up, a liberal adaptation of a Stephen King short story about cursed toys and even more accursed childhoods, he’s pretty much tackling the same subject matter again, but he does so with a reckless mean streak which might make even the condemned awaiting their turn on the gallows cringe. Oz Perkins’ The Monkey is another story about the scars of childhood but told through the prism of turn-of-the-century slasher movies and splatter cinema. Eagerly reaching toward a Grand Guignol aesthetic over anything that might be mistaken for elevated, The Monkey is deliberately kitsch. Unfortunately, for all the fun the filmmaker seems to be having, it’s a lot less grand to watch than its camp influences.
Ostensibly the story of a wind-up toy that causes someone to die a freak and gushy death every time it plays its drums, The Monkey is less about the toy in the title than it is the brothers who wind up in its possession. The monstrosity was accidentally bequeathed to them (perhaps) by a father they never really knew and who only appears in the movie’s sadistic prologue in a brief cameo by Adam Scott. Where he went after that is a mystery. All that’s certain is the Monkey sits (or waits) in a closet for twin brothers Hal and Bill (Christian Convery) to give it a go.
The saying that “first time is incidence, second time is coincidence, and third is enemy action” is quickly implemented as the brothers tinker with the doll, and each time someone close to them dies. Horribly. So the pair wisely decide to drop the furry little bastard down a well and never speak of him again. And yet, 25 years later after both twins have been upgraded into the burly frame of Theo James—and Hal now has a son of his own (Colin O’Brien)—the reality that generational trauma will not stay buried comes roaring to the surface as the Monkey shows back up in their former hometown, and neighbors start dropping like flies from their little, ghastly “accidents.”
The son of one of the most famous performers in horror history, Perkins is neither a stranger to horror’s trappings nor real-life tragedy. He’s known plenty of both, including brutally in the loss of his own parents. As a consequence, he admits he developed an oblique and acquired sense of humor. It might explain the ice-cold nihilism that runs through the veins of all his movies, but The Monkey feels like the first overt attempt to let us in on what he he sees is the joke.
If so, I suspect few who admired the creepy atmosphere of Longlegs or even Blackcoat’s Daughter will be laughing along. There are a lot of spectacularly gruesome death scenes in The Monkey. By the end of the film, they’re virtually having to pile bodies on the side of the road and our side of the screen across the aisles. The actors are wading through the corpses to hit their marks. In a certain sense, it is the excess of the Final Destination movies but with fewer considerations allowed for things like decorum or taste. It is a blood bath fit for the Roman waterworks of Caracalla.
And yet, unlike Final Destination and similar splatterfests of yore—Omen sequels or even a handful of Nightmare on Elm Streets—this thing is working hard to let us know how pleased it is with its schlocky self.
Well, it’s definitely schlock, but also given its Neon pedigree and its director’s natural tonal instincts, The Monkey errs as it tries to be something else too. It wants to be art and say something as profound about the sins of the father as Longlegs had to say about those of the mother.
But art—at least of the good variety—doesn’t reach for naturalism while having James play characters as arch as Bill, who as a fortysomething adult still talks to his brother like a ‘90s kid edgelord who stayed up late watching Andrew Dice Clay. With his 2025 mullet and paperback motivations, he doesn’t have much at all profound to say, but exists in a movie too self-serious (even if with a smirk) to be good schlock. Schlock should be fun; schlock should be delicious; The Monkey leaves you with a faintly rancid taste in your mouth.
There are some spectacular set pieces that revel in gonzo gore-letting, and there is at least one really good performance by Tatiana Maslany as Hal and Bill’s mother. Yet the screenplay saddles her like everyone else with characterization that feels neither human or heightened enough to crossover into camp. One doom-marked figure even later says that when a freak death occurs it must mean “God is bowling strikes today.” That’s apt in a film where everyone onscreen amounts to little more than a deadweight pin waiting to be knocked down.
Even the enigma of the father and why he left this terrible inheritance to his sons is neither examined or satisfyingly considered. That might reflect one of the bitterest ironies about life, but in a mess like this, it’s just another thread dangling with enough slack to hang the film. Which might be for the best.
The Monkey opens on Friday, Feb. 21. Learn more about Den of Geek’s review process and why you can trust our recommendations here.
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