‘The Monkey’ Review: Stephen King Movie is an Excellent Existential Bloodbath

Josh Korngut   |  

Feb 20, 2025

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“Everybody dies. Some of us peacefully and in our sleep, and some of us… horribly,” Lois tells her young boys, the three of them wearing their best formalwear, huddled together under an old Oak tree in a suburban graveyard. Played by the Emmy-award-winning Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black) in a small yet film-stealing performance, she continues to explain to her twin boys the randomness and ultimate meaninglessness of death and life.

Some of us are permitted to live long lives that end like the finale of Big Fish, with everyone we’ve ever loved by our sides. And for others, it’ll be more in line with the ending of The Vanishing, screaming and alone in intolerable terror. This thesis for The Monkey, a loose adaptation of the Stephen King short story of the same name, is beautifully fulfilled by the rest of the film: an existential and gut-drenched horror-comedy that’s unafraid to spotlight the utter insignificance (and sometimes joyful) experience of human life.

Also Read:
Tatiana Maslany on Death, Dying and Stephen King’s ‘The Monkey’ [February Cover Story]

In the film, directed by Osgood Perkins and based on Stephen King’s 1980 short story, twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn are haunted by a cursed toy monkey that brings death whenever it beats its drum. As little kids, they discover the uncanny toy among their estranged father’s few abandoned belongings, and soon after, a series of gruesome and inexplicable deaths begin to take place in their lives. Nothing they do to stop the toy monkey, including tossing it down a well, ever works. It always mysteriously comes back, continuing its deadly influence into their adult lives. The brothers, both played by the somewhat too-hunky-for-the-role Theo James (The White Lotus), are forced to confront their traumatic past and the sinister force that has plagued their family for decades, leading to a disturbingly hysterical and very violent dissection of fate, family, and the inescapable nature of death.

Writer/director Perkins was last on the scene with last year’s Longlegs, a polarizing horror release that broke box office records and the internet with a lengthy and embattled discourse. It was a love-it-or-hate-it sort of thing, dividing horror fans down the middle like some recent election. I may not have been one of its passionate supporters, but it’s tough to argue that the Maika Monroe/Nic Cage psychological chiller wasn’t chalked full of mood, style, and atmosphere. And where I felt these more superficial elements carried Longlegs, The Monkey uses them to its carnal advantage. This time, Perkins presents his audience with an impossibly simple story rooted deep in a darkly hilarious philosophical context.

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‘The Life of Chuck’: Mike Flanagan’s Chicken Soup for the Existentialist Soul [TIFF 2024 Review]

Like the soon-to-be-revived Final Destination series, this nasty new release is centered around several grisly accidental death set pieces; some are short and shocking, while others are drawn out … and, well, also pretty surprising. Like the aforementioned teen horror franchise, the violence of this film is an integral part of its appeal. It differentiates itself in how its brutality is elegantly earned by its existentialist POV. It intends to showcase life and death as purpose-free and insignificant. Not in the nihilistic sense, which supports the perpetuation of chaos, but instead by saying we take ourselves much too seriously. So let’s all calm down and do our best to have a good time with what little of it we have.

In the end, everybody dies. But not everybody lives. The Monkey proves itself a rare horror film that embraces its premise’s absurdity without sacrificing emotional weight. Perkins is a mad scientist of the macabre who gleefully injects hot red humor into the universal and primal terror that comes with confronting mortality. The film thrives on its ability to balance gallows humor with brutal, inventive horror, making it both a visceral thrill ride and a surprisingly profound meditation on fate. Whether you come for the carnage or stay for the existential crisis, The Monkey delivers something uniquely unsettling and oddly cathartic.