Osgood Perkins has been making quite a name for himself as a horror filmmaker. The son of Norman Bates himself, he is certainly in good standing to be taking over a dynasty in the genre. The Monkey is his first of two horror films releasing widely in 2025 (Keeper is scheduled for October, currently) and it looks to set itself apart from his previous films in a major way: it is funny and gory. Like, really gory. 

The funny bits start strong in the very first scene of The Monkey. Presented as a prologue, or cold open to borrow a term from television, it shows a frantic and bloodied Adam Scott attempting to pawn off the creepily designed titular monkey wind-up toy. Scott’s character is dressed like an airline pilot and he is frazzled and terrified. The pawn show purveyor has no interest in the “toy.” Arguing with the man and pleading that this is no toy gets the pilot nowhere. Within a swift moment the monkey cranks to life, beats its drum, and the shopkeeper dies. While the death is played for laughs, Scott’s performance is anything but. Well, until he tries to destroy the monkey with a flamethrower. 

This waffling between serious and silly, cartoonish and committed, is one of the elements that pulls The Monkey just short of reaching greatness. More on that later. 

A child’s voiceover, much like The Wonder Years, leads us from this preamble over to the main event. Twins Hal and Bill (Christian Convery) are anything but a bonded pair. Bill is a bully, and Hal is stewing with frustration after always being the one to get pushed into the metaphorical mud. One day, the two dig into their long-gone father’s storage closet and discover the little drumming monkey in what looks like a Tiffany blue hat box. Did they mention that their dad was a pilot who went out one night for cigarettes and never came back?

Just as quickly as the boys wind up that ominous monkey, their babysitter is killed in a freak accident. Through trial and error and a few funerals, the boys discover that they might be able to command the monkey to kill, but they have absolutely no say in who dies next. 

Fast forwarding 25 years, the boy’s voiceover morphs into a man’s (Theo James) and we see Hal as an adult. He has a loosely estranged son (Colin O’Brien) who is coming up on their single annual visit and is struggling his way through a mindless job in a small Maine town. 

The Monkey is based on a Stephen King short story of the same title, though it appears that the film is far more complex than the written version. In homage to the source’s author, there are plenty of Kingiverse details sprinkled throughout the film like an overzealous Easter Egg hunt. Signs, names, and dialogue all hold little treats that will delight devoted King fans without alienating the uninitiated. 

As the monkey resurfaces and the ‘accidental” deaths start again, Hal must seek out Bill to deal with the murderous pest once again. 

The most obvious source of joy in The Monkey is in the killings. Blood geysers, exploding bodies, and inventive mayhem pay off again and again throughout the film’s tight 98 minutes. Each kill is surprising, clever, and perfectly mean spirited. As a stunt before the film’s release, Perkins and James watched certain kill scenes with licensed morticians to drive home the absurdity of these deaths like proud parents. Laws of physics and physiology have no place in The Monkey, and that is brilliant. 

But back to that tonal waffling. With all the comically surreal kills and occasionally over-the-top performances to match, certain characters are played completely straight. James’s Hal is quite a serious man who is dealing with serious issues with his son and serious childhood trauma. As heads explode and entrails fly around him, this emotional weight never wavers for Hal. Though he might have been intended as a straight man to contrast this delightful absurdity against, it instead reads more like a tonal mismatch. Hal feels like he is in a different film than the rest of the action, and that is never the best impression. 

In the end, The Monkey is a wildly entertaining film with a healthy dose of nihilism and a few gallons of viscera. It is a rocky road tonally, but baring through those missteps is well worth it.