Vague Visages’ The Monkey review contains minor spoilers. Osgood Perkins’ 2025 movie features Theo James as Hal/Bill, Tatiana Maslany as Lois and Christian Convery as Young Hal/Young Bill. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

Without wanting to play armchair psychiatrist, filmmaker Oz Perkins has grown to have a flippant, darkly comic relationship with death as a coat of armor. It’s to be expected when both of his parents (actors Anthony Perkins and Berry Berenson) died in very public, unimaginably horrific circumstances. Perkins’ adaptation of Stephen King’s 1980 short story The Monkey can best be appreciated as a cathartic exercise, finding the most nihilistic (and broadest) of laughs in a tale about the inexplicable nature of mortality, transforming what could be a brooding, introspective narrative into a Final Destination-level splatter fest. I can only hope it was therapeutic for Perkins, as each over-the-top but unimaginative kill scene becomes increasingly insufferable the more the director leans into a whacky tone.

Theo James plays estranged brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn, who as kids (played by Christian Coventry) came into possession of a toy drumming monkey, which killed a random person nearby. Following the deaths of the siblings’ babysitter, mother (Tatiana Maslany as Lois) and others, they separate and reluctantly meet back up again nearly two decades later when another killing spree commences in their hometown, despite the withdrawn Hal’s protestations that he destroyed and buried the toy years earlier. His twin, Bill — still a cocky bully — insists on a reunion, as the brothers need to sell the old family home amidst the carnage. After spending years avoiding relationships, Hal realizes that he not only needs to return, but that he needs to bring his estranged son, Petey (Colin O’Brien), along with him.

The Monkey Review: Related — Review: Oz Perkins’ ‘Gretel & Hansel’

Again, it’s hard to avoid analyzing Perkins’ relationship with death when watching The Monkey; the shy, loner Hal all but welcomes interpretation as a director insert character, the most hyperbolic manifestation of a young man afraid that a gruesome end will come to anybody he loves. One of the reasons it’s hard to avoid scanning the movie for subtext in this fashion is because it’s not interesting nor particularly enjoyable on face value, neither nihilistic nor funny enough to justify its gleefully flippant tone. The Final Destination comparison will be unshakable for most audiences, and yet no set piece in The Monkey is as ingeniously constructed as the more forgettable in that franchise. Across the Final Destination series, each death is set up like a Rube Goldberg machine, constantly wrong-footing the audience with its meticulously macabre centerpiece moments, each death perfectly set up yet emerging from left field. In The Monkey, only a few sequences follow anything approaching a similar logic — more often, guns will fire by themselves, or people will just spontaneously pass away from rare conditions in a split second. It’s dramatically unsatisfying, which might be the point Perkins is trying to make, but it just doesn’t have any effect when these intended laugh moments land with a thud, and its whacky tone keeps suggesting that the director thinks each gag is hilarious. But you can’t land a punchline if you don’t nail the setup, and Perkins never once does. 

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It doesn’t help matters that James, an amiable screen presence in other projects, is out of his depth in both roles, severely miscast as both an awkward loner and a misunderstood evil genius. Perkins, fresh off of Longlegs (2024), seems convinced that any actor can attain Nicolas Cage’s skill for histrionic theatricality under his direction, and hearing James scream lines like “we need to make like eggs and scramble” — in a manner ill-suited to either character — only prompts second-hand embarrassment each time he’s nudged into this mode. The actor doesn’t have a handle on either role beyond the broadest of strokes, and Perkins’ screenplay often lets its misjudged character comedy get in the way of what feels believable to the established personality traits of each sibling.

The Monkey Review: Related — Review: Robert Eggers’ ‘Nosferatu’

I’m not a fan of Longlegs, but Perkins’ fondness for dark comedy has seen him regress as a filmmaker between projects by over-indulging in offbeat, irritatingly quirky laughs to the detriment of his horror storytelling. Admittedly, scaring audiences doesn’t seem to be the goal in The Monkey so much as numbing them to the unrelenting march of the grim reaper, finding laughs in death in the same fashion as early Tim Burton, only putting each comic idea on the screen with the same half-assed attitude as late-period Tim Burton. The more I consider The Monkey, the closer I come to viewing it as one of the weakest Stephen King adaptations.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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