The Monkey
By Jonas Schwartz-Owen
The Monkey, based on a Stephen King short story, is more an exercise than a movie. Death becomes so trivial that the cornucopia of mutilations portrayed rolls off one’s back as innocuously as clouds in the sky drift on the screen. Without a point of view or commentary, the film is empty, even if it is a lot of fun.
Twins from an erratic broken home fear that their new toy, a drumming monkey, is causing the violent deaths in their neighborhood. They bury the menace, but it returns with a vengeance years later. As an adult, Hal (played by Theo James, who also plays his twin Bill) can’t stop his life from unraveling. His wife has left him for a marriage guru (Elijah Wood in an amusing cameo), and he has lost custody of his child (Colin O'Brien). When he discovers the cursed creature has returned, he tracks down Bill to stop the toy once and for all.
Written by Osgood Perkins, whose Longlegs made a splash last year, adapted the film with a mission of working out his own childhood traumas. He had told Empire Magazine, “The thing with this toy monkey is that the people around it all die in insane ways. So, I thought: Well, I'm an expert on that.' Both my parents died in insane, headline-making ways” – father, Anthony, Norman Bates of Psycho, publicly suffered with AIDS before dying, and mother, Berry Berenson, died as a passenger of the plane that crashed into the North Tower on 9/11.
A spirit of futility oozes through the script and mise-en-scene. Perkins does capture an otherworldliness which works with the humorous tone despite the nihilistic nature of the story. For instance, this is the kind of movie you want to shout at the screen, “DON’T YOU KNOW WHAT MOVIE YOU’RE IN??? DON”T go to a hibachi restaurant!!!!!” to no avail.
Perkins exploits the design of the creature for maximum effect. Its presence is pure menace: with huge eyes and a vicious grin, a pulled back face like it had a bad face lift, every tooth visible and ready to rip someone apart, uncomfortably stiff like it’s ready to explode. The big joke is that the creature barely moves in the film and physically commits no murders, making it creepier. A Rube Goldberg series of events leads to decapitations, skewerings and bursting blood vessels.
The performances set the tone, including Tatiana Maslany as the twin’s loopy mother, Wood as the self-impressed interloper (he should have been given more screentime), Perkins as an uncomfortably pervy uncle, and Adam Scott as the kid’s frenetic dad. James handles the weight of being the protagonist, the straight man in an insane world, and his parental chemistry with O’Brien makes you care about their storyline.
The Monkey satirizes life and nightmarish adolescence in a clever, but ultimately unrewarding way. Nothing is to be taken seriously (even a funeral has no gravity). That can sting, especially in this current world order, but in a film where people are just meat with no control over circumstances and no weight in this universe, it is difficult to do anything but point and laugh.
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