"I was in New York on business about four years ago. I was walking back to my hotel after visiting my people at New American Library when I saw a guy selling wind-up monkeys on the street. There was a platoon of them standing on a gray blanket he'd spread on the sidewalk at the corner of Fifth and Forty-fourth, all grinning and bending and clapping their cymbals. They looked really scary to me, and I spent the rest of the walk back to the hotel wondering why. I decided they reminded me of the lady with the shears . . . the one who cuts everyone's thread one day. So keeping that in mind, I wrote the story, most of it longhand, in a hotel room."
--Stephen King, "Story Note on 'The Monkey,'" Skeleton Crew, 1985
The new film version of The Monkey (2025) is a bit of a departure for director Osgood Perkins. It has a grotesque sense of humor that I didn't know he had and an instinct for the grand guignol that is new to his films. Ordinarily, his films are mood pieces that trade on atmosphere and menace more than plot, but this one is a cartoon. It shares with the Stephen King story its central idea of a wind-up monkey that causes death when it's wound up to action. In the story, the monkey has a pair of cymbals. In the movie they've changed it to a drum for reasons of copyright (they did not want to run afoul of Disney and their army of lawyers). It's a minor change. It also takes from the story its central characters, two brothers who find the monkey in childhood and realize its power. Apart from that, this is a film that ranges far afield of King's story, which is nothing new to the author. "Based on" is too strong a credit for what this takes from King. "Suggested by" might have been more apt. That doesn't mean that it's bad. Just different.
The story follows Hal and Bill Shelburn, twin sons of pilot Petey Shelburn, who has returned from one of his trips abroad with a wind-up monkey. The brothers find the monkey still in its box some time after their father has vanished from their lives. Bill is the elder brother and is a monster to his younger brother in the way older brothers have been monsters for eons. Hal, who narrates, notes that Bill ate most of their mother's placenta before embarking on a life of petty cruelty toward his brother. Hal takes custody of the monkey and it mysteriously appears in the back seat of their babysitter's car when they go to dinner at a hibachi restaurant. The monkey beats its drum while they are at dinner and lo, their babysitter is accidentally decapitated by the chef. Hal is convinced that the monkey is responsible. He fantasizes about dropping a bowling ball on his brother's face while he's sleeping, but chooses instead to wish on the monkey to kill his brother. The monkey beats its drum, and it's not Bill who suffers its wrath, but their mother, who drops dead from an aneurysm while decorating a cake. Now orphaned, they go to live with their Uncle Chip and Aunt Ida. The monkey strikes again, and soon Uncle Chip is trampled to death in a stampede of wild horses when he's out hunting. Hal shares the secret of the monkey with his brother then, and together, they weight it down and drop it down a well. Twenty years pass. Hal is now a divorced father who has kept his son at a distance for fear of the monkey. Hal knows that it will return one day. He hasn't spoken or seen Bill in years. His son, Petey (named for Hal's father), lives with his mother with a self-help expert on fatherhood who plans to adopt Petey as his own. Hal's annual week with his son is going to be their last together. Meanwhile, Aunt Ida discovers the monkey lurking out in the darkness one night, and soon enough she suffers a freak conglomeration of accidents. At the estate sale, a disaffected young man buys the monkey. When Bill calls Hal to tell him that Ida is dead, and that he must come to Maine to deal with her estate, it interrupts the father/son road trip. While he's on the phone, Hal witnesses another spectacular accident in which a woman at the hotel is killed by an electrified swimming pool. He knows in his bones that the monkey is responsible. At Aunt Ida's, Hal insists that Petey stay out while he tours the property with the real estate lady who will be selling the house. She mentions to Hal that there have been a series of freak accidents in town--one a day--before suffering from one herself. Clearly, someone is turning the key on the monkey. Hal resolves to find Bill so they can finish what they started as kids...
The Monkey announces its intentions in its first scene, in which the elder Petey Shelburn attempts to return the monkey to the store where he bought it. The owner refuses, but ends up impaled on a spear from a spear gun, which has a winch to reel it back, drawing the man's intestines out behind it. Petey is played by Adam Scott, an actor known for comedies, and he plays Petey broadly, especially when he discovers a flamethrower for sale in the store. He burns the monkey, then no more is seen of Captain Petey Shelburn again. The gore gags in the rest of the film escalate. The death of Annie Wilkes, the babysitter, is a decapitation, sure, but her head falls onto the hibachi grill. The woman who dives into the electrified swimming pool explodes when she hits the water, and so on. It plays as a sick variety of slapstick a la Sam Raimi or Peter Jackson and culminates in a final flurry of gags that are downright apocalyptic in their mayhem. In truth, this doesn't remind me of "The Monkey's Paw," the story to which "The Monkey" is most often compared, or of "The Monkey" itself, so much as it reminds me of Ray Bradbury's "The Reaper." Death himself makes an appearance as a pale rider riding a pale horse, which is far beyond the scope of the short story, and way beyond anything Perkins has ever placed in one of his films (the actual form of the Witch in Gretel + Hansel is probably the closest thing to what he attempts in this film).
This has more plot than Perkins usually bothers with, too. This is contingent on the relationship between Hal and his brother, then between Hal and his son. Both relationships are adversarial, which gives the film layers of conflict. This is a film that externalizes the dysfunction of the Shelburns with elaborate gore set-pieces, true, but the actors absolutely understand the assignment. Hal and Bill as children are played by Christian Convey and it's a startling child performance. One could be forgiven for thinking that there were two actors in the roles, because in terms of personality, posture, and even size in the frame, they are clearly two separate characters. Think of it as a kid's version of what Jeremy Irons did in Dead Ringers. Theo James plays the brothers as adults, and his performances rely more on the screenplay and the roles of the two characters in the plot. It's not as good as the child performances, but it works well enough for pulp fiction, where one character is clearly styled as a mustache-twirling villain. The secret sauce in this film is Tatiana Maslany, who has the thankless role of the twins' mother, but who nevertheless conveys a broad philosophical weariness. She articulates the film's thesis about death, with a duality of pure chance vs. determinism without picking a side. She's a character that seems like she belongs in Perkins's other films, and through her, this film becomes weirder than the story on which it's based. All of the supporting characters are subtly twisted out of true, from the rookie priest who presides over the funerals of the babysitter and Lois Shelburn to Perkins himself playing Uncle Chip, a man who apparently takes his grooming tips from Elvis impersonators. By the end of the film, in spite of the slapstick gore and the breathless plot, this still resembles Perkins's other films, in so far as it keeps the audience uncomfortable even when it doesn't have to. This is a film that will provide plenty of laughs to the right kind of audience, but even that audience will be nervous about it.
 |
| "Everybody dies." |
Early in the film, after the death of the babysitter, Lois Shelburn comforts her sons by telling them that it's okay because everything dies. She will die, they will die, everyone they know will die. Then she articulates the difference between a peaceful death in bed and a horrible death in some ghastly accident. That's the horror movie in a nutshell right there. The concept of the "bad death" is key to even the crudest horror stories told by kids on a playground. This film leans hard into the bad death. Death, in this film, is a lot like Death in the Final Destination films, in so far as he's a comedian and the creator of elaborate Rube Goldberg machines to facilitate bad deaths for his targets. Lois also mediates between "everything happens for a reason" and "the universe is random." This idea is also incorporated into the monkey. Both Hal and Bill think they "know" the rules of the monkey--the pattern of death, as it were--but neither of them do. They attempt to use the monkey to target people for death and it never works. Everything goes wrong because of their hubris. They think the monkey is the reason things happen--and the film takes this view, too--but the choice of victims is out of their hands. The woman at the hotel is a random death. The real estate agent is a random death. Like Lois telling her sons about death, the movie splits the difference.
I do not know if this film represents a new direction for Oz Perkins. On the one hand, yes. It is both funnier and pacier than anything he's made before. This film does not indulge in the slow cinema wankery that sometimes dogs his other films. It has, for want of a better phrase, more entertainment value. It doesn't look much like his other films, either. He has chosen a more vibrant color palette than the dreary monotone of his other films to go along with this film's cartoonish violence. In spite of all of this, this film is also weirder than you would expect of a more mainstream gore fest. Certainly the relationship between brothers is not what you normally see in horror movies, nor does the film bend to the idea that the brothers must reconcile as a condition of the film's worth. Quite the opposite. The film sets a trap in the early part of the movie and conspicuously doesn't set it off until the very end, when most viewers might have forgotten it or not recognized it as a gun on a mantlepiece. This trap forestalls the contemporary genre's deference to families. Its real theme is made manifest in one of its last images, after most of the plot has unspooled, an image that would be at home in a Bergman movie. It's so on the nose that you might mistake it as a put on. You could say the same about the whole film.
This blog is supported on Patreon by wonderful subscribers. If you like what I do, please consider pledging your own support. It means the world to me.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment