Bespectacled Hal gets bullied around in school, also by his twin brother Bill at home. The twins live with their single mother (Tatiana Maslany). It's the 90s. They find a windup toy monkey left by their absent father (Adam Scott, shown briefly in the beginning, blow torching the monkey). When the monkey gets winded up, people around it die in some horrible accidents. After their mom dies of brain aneurism (because of the monkey), Hal chops up the monkey and throws it away. After the twins get adopted by their aunt and uncle and move to Maine, they find that the monkey has followed them. It doesn't matter why monkey chose them. It just is. Uncle with the impressive lambchop sideburn (played drolly by Perkins himself) dies first, stampeded by band of horses in a sleeping bag while camping, then twenty five years later, aunt dies horribly too. After many more highly inventive kill offs with many of the population in town dead, Bill and Hal need to finish the job of destroying the monkey, if they could. If not, they will need to learn how to live with the monkey.
If Osgood Perkins's Longlegs left you scratching your head in dissatisfaction, as it walked the tight rope between being a psychological horror and a comedy, please give him another chance with The Monkey, an all out horror-comedy that will wipe off your doubts about his talent as a filmmaker-to-watch. Perkins has a very peculiar sense of humor, to say the least. And his take on Stephen King's short story is an unabashedly slap-sticky, full on gore-fest that doesn't take itself too seriously.
Just like Longlegs, the pace of The Monkey is breezy. It progresses too quickly for us to question what's happening or why. And it's a good thing. Soon you realize that the narrative doesn't really matter. It's all just vibes. Theo James, playing both Hal and Bill, is eagerly along for the ride and keeps the serious face the whole time. Maslany hamms it up to match the film's weird vibe. All the peripheral characters - Hal's boss at the hardware store, the rookie priest, Elija Wood's creepy self-help guru, Perkins's uncle Chip and the tiny Asian girl bully all enhances to the truly peculiar vibe of the movie.
The Monkey is not necessarily the movie that we asked for, but the movie we need in these dark times.
