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Osgood Perkins’s 2024 sleeper hit horror Longlegs needed Nicolas Cage to work. It needed his jittery unpredictability, that manic look in the actor’s eye, that feeling that he’d taken the wheel of our car and left us unsure whether we were headed home or straight into a ditch. Perkins’s follow-up, The Monkey, revolves around a pair of twins cursed by a mechanical monkey that’s really a harbinger of death – every time it goes tap, tap, tap on its tin drum, somebody dies. It’s a diabolically fun premise, but it needed somebody Cage-ier to sell it.
Perkins has expanded a short story by Stephen King, and The White Lotus’s Theo James – playing the roles of both Hal and Bill Shelburn – has a good handle on the author’s charmingly peculiar tempo. King’s narrators always sound like they’ve hustled up to you in the last, dead hours of a city bar, with a can of beer in hand and a tale of woe on their lips. James captures that drawled morbidity.
It’s the twitchiness, though, that’s absent. And it’s key here. Bill blames Hal for their dad leaving when they were kids and has bullied him relentlessly for it. It wasn’t Bill’s fault, of course. It was the monkey’s. We meet their dad, played by Adam Scott, in the film’s first frames, dressed in a bloodied pilot’s uniform as he tries to thrust ownership of the cursed automaton (never call it a “toy”) onto an unwitting pawn shop owner.
Death’s sickle soon swings down. It then continues to swing down, again and again, throughout the duration of Perkins’s film. It’s a busy catalogue of gruesome absurdities that’s more consciously surrealist than the Final Destination series’s Mouse Trap-style executions, akin instead to the bizarro corpses crowding the afterlife’s waiting room in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988), with a splash of Peter Jackson’s early, gore-splattered horror-comedies.
Longlegs, certainly, had its moments of self-conscious silliness, once its serial killer hunt descended into a devilish game of peekaboo, but The Monkey feels like a more conscious move away from the Gothic chambers of Perkins’s earlier horror films, The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015) and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016). Here we’re in an Americana dreamscape ruled over by pothead priests indifferent to death, and cheerleading squads who whoop and shake their pom-poms when they see a body bag carried to an ambulance.
It’s the kind of place you want to stick around – if only to see how weird it can truly get. And it’s well populated, between the sociopathic optimism of Elijah Wood’s Ted Hammerman, stepdad to Hal’s son Petey (Colin O’Brien); the secretive mania of Tatiana Maslany’s Lois, Hal and Bill’s mom, who so enthusiastically tells her children of death’s inevitability; and Perkins’s own role as Chip, Hal and Bill’s uncle, who sports the finest pair of mutton-chops you can imagine.
Yet Hal and Bill, as the focus of events and two distinct inheritors of generational trauma (via murderous mechanical monkey), don’t quite fit in. Bill isn’t as eccentric as the plot tells us he should be, while Hal, the more passive of the two, should still read as a frayed-nerve loner likely to yell the phrase, “We gotta make like eggs and scramble!” That doesn’t mean The Monkey necessarily needed Cage. But if you’ve seen any of Dan Stevens’s performances from the past year, in Abigail or Cuckoo – he’d certainly have hit the spot.
Dir: Osgood Perkins. Starring: Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Elijah Wood, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell, Sarah Levy. 15, 98 minutes.
‘The Monkey’ is in cinemas from 21 February
