The Monkey Review: This Stephen King Adaptation Is Bananas In All The Best Ways

As "The Monkey" arrives in theaters, writer and director Osgood "Oz" Perkins is riding a wave of goodwill and viral success among genre devotees thanks to "Longlegs," his twisted serial killer film that became one of 2024's most-watched and most-praised horror outings. By the time "Longlegs" was unleashed on audiences, Perkins was already well on his way to releasing his follow-up, and now the film has arrived with a certain added weight — expectations on its shoulders created by "Longlegs" and its dreadful power.

If you're heading to the theater hoping for another "Longlegs," be warned that "The Monkey" will not give you that. But in every other imaginable way, Perkins' latest feature is the perfect follow-up for his last film, because it's a showcase not just of the director's style, but of his impish sense of humor and his ability to turn on a dime. Violent, laugh-out-loud funny, and often cartoonishly macabre, "The Monkey" is everything "Longlegs" is not, and yet it fits perfectly in Perkins' larger body of work. And like "Longlegs," it's a horror experience that should not be missed.

Twin brothers Hal and Bill (the adult versions both played by Theo James, and the younger played by Christian Convery) have a problem, one that's haunted them since childhood. When their absentee airline pilot father skipped town, he left behind a closet of souvenirs from his travels, and since their mother (Tatiana Maslany) doesn't care to touch it all, the boys have free rein of their father's purchases. One such item is a strange, wind-up organ grinder monkey that plays the drums whenever you turn its key. It's creepy enough on its own, but this monkey has an added layer of menace: every time those drums play, someone dies in an often hysterically violent, over-the-top freak occurrence.

When the young boys become aware of this object's strange power in 1999, they do everything they can to hide it away, putting it somewhere it'll never be found. But this monkey won't go quietly, and 25 years later, the twins are once again on the trail of the monkey as it wreaks havoc on a small Maine town, and changes their lives for the worse once again.

Based on the short story of the same name by Stephen King, Oz Perkins twists and expands the story to suit his purposes — including giving the monkey a drum instead of King's cymbals — but the core of the tale is still the same. The Monkey, in both versions of the story, is more than a cursed object or a manifestation of trauma for the twins. It's an inexplicable force of nature, as immovable and unchanging as rain, who's latched onto this one family and sought to rip them apart in any way that it can. What's perhaps most remarkable about the entire film is its ability to keep that core intact and explore it until "The Monkey" becomes a story about parents and children, fathers and sons, and the inescapable pain of caring about people. This is a raucous, often hysterical movie, and yet it never loses sight of that idea, and that alone is an achievement.

Early in the film, a character reminds us of the inevitably of death by simply declaring "everybody dies." It's an important thematic moment, but it also may as well be the movie's mission statement. A lot of people die in "The Monkey," from the first scene to the final shot, and they die in ways both elaborate and undeniably entertaining.

It would be frightening enough to possess an object that could kill people at the drop of a toy drumstick, but what makes this monkey especially awful is its ability to engineer elaborate, horrendously violent, and often deliciously ironic deaths for its characters. It doesn't just kill you. It kills you like a cartoon character would kill you, and Oz Perkins and company have a ball going full Wile E. Coyote on the gore elements in this movie. Leading a cast of hilarious ensemble players, Theo James is remarkably game for all of this, throwing himself headlong into showers of blood, guts, and brains while also trying to play the heart of the film, the sense that something in these twins is both deeply broken and deeply sympathetic. It's a masterclass in horror acting, particularly as the gore is flying, and because James plays two characters, he gets to give us multiple sides to it all.

But the film's real star in the end is its title character, who not only looks great, but represents the kind of rollicking, unhinged film you're about to see. If "Longlegs" was all about the rotted core of the world leaking out into our daily lives, poisoning our interactions and our sense of safety, then the monkey is a cosmic banana peel upending your entire life simply because it can. It's a chaotic movie built around an agent of chaos, and while that leads to the occasional slippery storytelling and muddles the third act just a bit, that chaos is where Perkins apparently thrives. He's never made a film like this before, and through the monkey — a kind of dark storyteller in its own right because of its ability to manipulate reality — he thrives in this new environment of breakneck, blood-gushing insanity. Like "Longlegs," it's an example of a horror filmmaker marshaling all of their talents to set a very specific tone, and this time it's responsible for some of the most fun you'll have at the movies this year. "The Monkey" is a deranged face-melter, just waiting for throngs of horror fans to bask in its madness.

"The Monkey" lands in theaters on February 21.