The Monkey is a 2025 movie based on a short story by Stephen King.
It follows twins who, after finding a musical toy monkey that belonged to their father, discover that every time it moves its drumstick, a murder occurs nearby. The movie explores the escalation of their actions, from simple pranks to acts of pure violence, finally revealing the extent of the monkey’s powers.
Elevated horror or a lot of drugs ?
I imagine that one can find elevated horror in The Monkey if one digs a little beyond the absurdity of it all.
The central theme would be hereditary trauma caused in childhood, passed down from generation to generation.
That’s giving them a lot of credit though.
Instead, they decided to go completely off the rails.
There were very few of us in the theater when I went to see it, and by the time the credits rolled, it had become silent, with everyone staring wide-eyed, trying to understand what we had just watched.
Now, don’t get me wrong, the movie is still very decent despite this unusual aspect. The analogies are good, the gore is great, the monkey’s design is creepy, and the murders are almost worthy of Final Destination…
But the storyline and script gave up along the way and decided to go on a vacation with some of the characters who aren’t very useful to the story.
We have a cast that includes cameos by Elijah Wood and Adam Scott, and it’s a movie by Osgood Perkins, who created Longlegs. James Wan (Saw, The Conjuring…) is even attached to this through his producing company.
We started off on solid -yet weird- ground here… What happened ?
The Perkins legacy
For the record, Perkins is the son of Anthony Perkins, who played Norman Bates in Psycho.
He has a very specific vision when he embarks on a project, and often you either love his creativity or you don’t.
I respect what he wanted to do, but unfortunately for me, it veered too far into the realm of absurdity.
It’s like someone trying to describe a nightmare they had for an hour and a half.
“And then a monkey plays the drums, and it triggers random deaths with everyday objects or accidents, but never on the person you want. And then, and then poof, blood everywhere.”
I like my horror comedy with a bit more structure and likable characters, I guess.
An antagonist in a child’s suit
Based on Stephen King‘s classic themes, we have school bullies, but the main one is Bill, the brother.
The dynamic between the twins works, up to a point.
Sadly, he’s an antagonist who ends up looking ridiculous.
Whether it’s with his obsession, particularly the videos of monkeys in his lair, the phone booth, the Rube Goldberg-style traps, or the fact that he always wears his mother’s funeral suit, adjusted to fit his adult body. He is not threatening in the slightest, and yet he is responsible, along with the monkey, for almost all of the deaths in the movie.
Sadly, he is not crazy enough to be funny either. He’s in the limbo in between.
Bill may, if we take the trauma theory, represent the loss of control following repeated bereavements, but since it is his madness that is most prominent, we cannot take this approach with the seriousness it deserves.
The same goes for the cheerleaders, who represent the voyeurism of horror movie audiences or true crime consumers who celebrate when bodies are wheeled out in the open.
In another movie, it would have been shocking and caused a stir, but not here.
The beauty of the unexplained
On the other hand, I liked that we don’t know the monkey’s origin or how it really works.
Why it waited 25 years between attacks is never really explained, nor is the choice of victims or the complex process of death, and that’s really enjoyable. It can teleport, kills at random, and looks creepy. And that works well.
In the end, the Horseman of Death who is completely perplexed by the apocalypse unfolding, I have to admit, made me smile.
My rating : 2,5/5 bats.
🦇🦇🩸 🩸 🩸
(Picture a half-eaten bat here, the emojis won’t let me do it)