The monkey is an organ-grinder’s monkey toy. Wind up the key jutting out of its back, and its lips will part to reveal two rows of yellow grimacing teeth. Then its clockwork arms will wheel up and down, banging a little drum as fairground music plays. And then someone nearby dies in an extremely gory freak accident. Maybe their head will be sliced off in a knife-twirling incident at a teppanyaki restaurant and slide gently on to the grill. Maybe they’ll fall through the stairs and into a box of fishhooks and then set their head on fire over a gas hob, and then run outside and impale themselves on a wooden spike. Maybe some huge Rube Goldberg arrangement of faulty wiring and loose roofing tiles will cause their body to explode in a shower of soft crimson globs. But what’s for certain is as soon as the monkey plays the drum, someone dies.
A few decades ago, this would have been the premise of a dumb, disposable horror flick. A Final Destination film, possibly with one extra gimmick. But the genre has been in a weird spot lately. As the rest of mainstream cinema trails off into an endless stutter of reboots and sequels, horror is suddenly very respectable. The last decade has seen a series of ‘elevated’ horror movies, from David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows to Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar, to last year’s Longlegs, written and directed by Osgood Perkins, who also wrote and directed The Monkey. Elevated horror looks good: lush cinematography, lots of slow and menacing shots instead of cheap jump scares. In traditional horror films, our characters are thin stereotypes who mostly exist to stand around screaming before being killed; elevated horror is populated by psychologically complex figures whose personal traumas intersect with the horror plot in interesting, nuanced ways. In other words, elevated horror, for the most part, sucks.
The problem with all this psychological depth is that horror is already a way of peering into the human psyche. It works through weird symbols, shadows, the parts of ourselves that are inaccessible to reason, which is why it’s so powerful, and why people are always so eager to start blanketing it in interpretations. But trying to jam these weird symbols together with plodding, bog-standard psychological realism doesn’t really do much to elevate it; instead, I’m just left feeling as though the film doesn’t have much faith in its own metaphors. If it did, it wouldn’t need to deploy big flashing signs that say ‘THIS IS ABOUT TRAUMA’ for half its runtime.
Unlike so many po-faced prestige horrors, The Monkey is actually funny
But here, The Monkey was a pleasant surprise. It’s in luscious 35mm and starts with a fucked-up family unit in the late 1990s – both of which are massive red flags. Hal and Bill are the twins of a chaotic mother and a father who went out one day for cigarettes and never came back. One day, they find the mass-murdering monkey among the heaps of their dad’s abandoned stuff in the attic; after a few turns of the key, their entire lives are ripped apart, and when we rejoin them in adulthood, they’re still living with the consequences. This sounds full of meaning. In the end, though, the film turned out to be loudly, proudly dumb.
Unlike so many po-faced prestige horrors, The Monkey is actually funny. There’s a vague theme, something to do with absent fathers and the generational legacies they leave behind, but it’s never developed so earnestly it gets in the way. It all feels lightly tacked on: this is a film about watching people die in increasingly baroque and unlikely ways. Which is exactly as it should be.
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