The Monkey review – slapdash splatter comedy is a grating misfire

Writer-director Osgood Perkins follows up horror hit Longlegs with a tiresome, juvenile adaptation of a Stephen King short story about an evil toy monkey

“Everybody dies and that’s fucked up” is the tagline and emo ethos of snarky Stephen King adaptation The Monkey, a film about the inescapable inevitability yet goofy silliness of death. The writer-director Osgood Perkins, who scored a hit with last year’s Longlegs, knows more about it than most. His father, the actor Anthony Perkins, died of Aids when Osgood was 18 and then his mother, the actor and model Berry Berenson, died in the September 11 attacks as a passenger on Flight 11. Perkins has found a way to work through something so unimaginably awful with a career as a horror film-maker, and his latest, focused on twins cursed by generational trauma is his most obviously personal film yet.

To his credit, Perkins has chosen not to wallow in the grim dirge associated with trauma and the horror genre. The original script for The Monkey had apparently delivered its central conceit – a toy monkey that brings death to those around it – with a straight face, something he found to be discordant, insisting a lighter, comedy-over-horror makeover. But the humour here is far too smug and nihilistic, similar to the grating can-you-believe-we’re-doing-this swagger of the Deadpool series, so happy with itself that it doesn’t really care if anyone else is smiling too. The film has a juvenile middle-finger-up attitude that confuses broad fuck-the-world misanthropy for actual edginess, annoying enough for a scene but close to insufferable for an entire movie. It’s also a tone that doesn’t really work for a King adaptation and when a flash of his earnestness does shine through, it’s uncomfortably out of place, providing more of a jolt than any of the ineffective death scenes which rely on brash and empty Looney Tunes violence. If the aim is numbing us to the shock of a violent death then perhaps the film succeeds but surely we shouldn’t be quite so bored by it too.

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