The Monkey
Older than him by three whole minutes, Hal Shelburn has always been dominated and bullied by his twin Bill, siding with the school bullies, tormenting him at home, claiming any of the belongings left by their absent father as his own rather than sharing them as keepsakes or memories as they searched for clues as to who he might have been, going through his clothes and belongings and finding the organ grinder monkey with its drum, toothy smile and staring eyes.
Twenty five years have passed since the strange events of 1999, the tragic deaths of their babysitter Annie, their mother Lois and then their Uncle Chip who took them in, Hal and Bill becoming convinced that it was the monkey which prompted each of the bizarre incidents, causing them to throw it down a deep well, but following the equally improbable death of Aunt Ida it seems to Hal that the monkey has returned, a theory confirmed by a telephone call from his estranged brother who charges him with locating the apparently cursed object.
Directed by Osgood Perkins from his own adaptation of the 1980 short story by Stephen King of the same name, naturally set in Maine but filmed around Vancouver, The Monkey expands that premise to extremes of improbable and outrageous deaths from the opening scene where dad Petey (Hellraiser: Bloodline’s Adam Scott) attempts to return the titular menace to the second hand shop where he purchased it, the shelves lined with oddities and ephemera, any item of which could conceivably be a weapon in the wrong hands.
The monkey doing nothing other than beating its drum, like The Monkey’s Paw it is a herald, a trigger which cannot be directed, hearing the pleading of those who turn the key but thwarting their intention with malice, Underworld’s Theo James at the end of his tether as the adult Bill, desperate to protect his teenage son Petey (Colin O’Brien) from the chaos which defined his childhood since the death of Lois (She-Hulk’s Tatiana Maslany), while Bill (James presenting a radically different persona) has become a recluse obsessed with the finding the totem.
Playing a very different game than the cat and mouse mystery and misdirections of Longlegs even as it keeps the bleak, bare tree midwinter feel of Perkins’ previous film, The Monkey is absolutely direct in its intentions, a comedy horror built around showmanship, offering a rapid-fire barrage of preposterous kills, sometimes in montage, Hal forced to participate even though he knows at every turn there will be a loser whom he cannot save, a player up for elimination in every round, scenes set up with obvious sources of peril but the payoff never clear until it explodes, sometimes quite literally.
With Sweet Tooth’s Christian Convery simultaneously earnest and venomous as the younger versions of Hal and Bill and Perkins himself appearing briefly as the admittedly honest but fundamentally unsuited to be a step-parent and ultimately ill-fated Uncle Chip, from the nostalgia of the late nineties which actually looks more like the seventies to the haunted and terrible present, The Monkey is a film neither subtle nor understated, as endlessly attention-seeking at the titular automaton but churning out grim laughter and shocks like clockwork.
The Monkey will be on general release from Friday 21st February
