Jun 19

Jun 19 Movie Review : The Monkey (2025)

I hate when people say they didn’t like a movie because "it didn’t make sense." Of course it didn’t. That’s why it’s a movie. Real life doesn’t have cursed toys that kill people either, but if it did, it’d be way more interesting. The Monkey, directed by Osgood Perkins, understands this. It doesn’t waste time justifying its premise. There’s a haunted wind-up monkey. It plays drums. People die. That’s the deal. If you need lore, go watch Lord of the Rings.

Perkins, ever the atmosphere guy, directs like dread is a vintage aesthetic. This is Final Destination by way of Antiques Roadshow, but with more intergenerational trauma and better lighting. You’re not watching to understand, you’re watching because some part of you remembers believing your dead uncle’s toys could kill you.

The Monkey tells the story of Bill and Hal Shelburn (both played by Theo James), twins who’s lives were permanently altered by a wind-up monkey that plays drums every time someone’s about to die. Bill, the alpha-grade jerk, leans into the curse like it’s a power he can control. Hal does what most of us would do: he runs, hides, and ruins his life out of fear. But when his ex’s new husband (an awesomely scummy Elijah Wood) offers to adopt his son, Hal sees one final chance to stop being a coward and a deadbeat.

How to Reappear

Although it murders everything in sight, the titular monkey in Osgood Perkins’ film is mostly accessory to the story. This is really about a man trying to become brave enough to face his own inevitable death and still be there for his son. The monkey acts as a kind of dark reflection of Hal. Something that just won’t fucking go away. You toss it in the trash, it crawls out. You bury it, it digs up your dog.

In a twisted way, that’s what being a good dad is supposed to look like: relentless, unbothered by adversity, single-minded in the task of showing up for the people you love. Except, you know. He’s a cursed mechanical monkey that kills people.

It’s also a… well, not a representation. The monkey is literal intergenerational trauma. A demented family heirloom handed down from Bill and Hal’s dad like one shitty father would pass down alcoholism. And Hal, to his credit, kind of gets it. He knows that if he keeps pulling the same disappearing act his old man did, the monkey doesn’t stop, it just moves on to the next kid.That’s one of the many low-key hilarious allegorical details that hit you after you’ve seen The Monkey and let it sit for a couple days.

Because simmering like a bad day at the office, it will.

Then there’s Bill who’s literally Evil Hal. He’s everything our protagonist is afraid of becoming. Where Hal runs from the monkey, Bill embraces it. He tries to turn fear into power, domination, control. It’s cartoonish masculinity filtered through a cursed wind-up toy. And while I’m not usually a fan of movies about fatherhood (they tend to feel like beer commercials with more crying), The Monkey plays like a haunted funhouse where symbols become literal objects, and literal people slide sideways into the symbolic order.

I wouldn’t call it psychological, exactly. It’s more like it drags psychological meaning outside the brain and smears it across the landscape, until the external world starts to mirror Hal’s internal one. And that, for me, is the good stuff.

The Counterintuitive Art of Atmospheric Comedies

Now Osgood Perkins made a statement with Longlegs: atmosphere can be the point. And while that’s not exactly the case with The Monkey, it’s close. Atmosphere here doesn’t carry the whole weight, but it keeps the movie unpredictable and unpredictability is what makes it compelling. Perkins builds a lingering tension using a mechanism that’s both inevitable and unstable.

Death is coming, sure, but how much pain it’ll bring and how personal it’s going to feel, is like playing a cursed hand of Blackjack. It’s your nervous system at the table, and the house always wins. Think jump scares, but slower, weirder, and delivered with a knowing smirk, like the film itself is whispering "you saw that coming, but you didn’t feel it coming, did you?"

The scares are never cheap, and the kills are often weirdly funny even if the important characters have a surprising amount of depth. Sure, some of the peripheral folks are just there to die horribly (looking at you, Aunt Ida), because that’s the job description for Tier 2 horror characters. But the real tension isn’t in who dies, it’s in what each death takes away from Hal and Petey’s chance at a normal life.

Every time a drumstick slams down, it pushes them further from reality, from safety, from the idea that they might ever be OK again. And yet, paradoxically, they grow closer with each body drop. That contradiction, the shrinking future and the deepening bond, made me uncomfortable in a way I’ve never quite felt before. Like watching hope survive in a room slowly running out of air.

The Monkey is a smart movie that doesn’t pretend to be profound and that might be the most interesting thing about it. Osgood Perkins shows that you can aim to simply entertain without defaulting to clichés or insulting the audience’s intelligence. Every creative choice feels considered, like someone actually cared whether the scenes worked or not and in 2024, it feels somehow feels radical.

Perkins may not be a groundbreaking storyteller, but he’s a damn good craftsman. And more importantly, he has a voice. A strange, precise, whispering-in-the-dark kind of voice.