A sinister doll seems to be responsible for a series of extraordinarily gory deaths in The Monkey, now playing in Prague and cinemas worldwide. This adaptation of Stephen King‘s short story published in the 1985 compilation Skeleton Crew is more self-aware than its source, and turns into an engagingly offbeat comedy punctuated by sudden, sometimes shockingly gruesome scenes of violence. If Wes Anderson made a splatter movie, it might look something like this.
Directed by Osgood Perkins (following up last year’s breakout horror hit Longlegs), The Monkey tells the story of multiple generations of the Shelborn family, opening with an uncredited Adam Scott as Petey Shelburn, a haunted man trying to rid himself of a cursed toy monkey. The film wastes no time establishing its tone: a chain-reaction accident involving a harpoon gun and an antiques shop owner delivers an over-the-top, blood-spattered prelude that signals the carnage to come.
The Monkey soon shifts focus to twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn, played as kids by Christian Convery and as adults by Theo James. After their father’s unexplained disappearance, the boys uncover the malevolent toy monkey among his belongings. Winding its key results in death—most memorably when their unfortunate babysitter Annie (Danica Dreyer) meets a spectacularly gruesome end at a hibachi restaurant.
The monkey’s curse escalates, claiming their mother (Tatiana Maslany, bringing an emotional heft missing from the rest of the movie) as well as various townsfolk in a series of increasingly outrageous set pieces. As the brothers grow older and try to escape the monkey’s grasp—literally throwing it down a well—it becomes clear that the toy’s reach is inescapable.
When the monkey resurfaces decades later, the film pivots to themes of generational trauma and the futility of trying to outrun fate. In order to protect his young son Petey (Colin O’Brien), Hal decides that he can’t be near him, and leaves him with his ex-wife (Laura Mennell) and her self-help guru husband Ted (Elijah Wood)—until a fateful trip to his childhood home brings Hal and Petey closer to the resurrected monkey.
Shocking scenes of death are The Monkey‘s main attraction, and Perkins stages each with a morbid inventiveness that borders on slapstick. Highlights include an electrified swimming pool, a horse stampede, and a particularly grotesque demise involving a shotgun, each rendered with practical gore effects that recall the gleeful nastiness of ‘80s splatter films.
There’s an undeniable joy in the film’s commitment to finding new and ludicrous ways for the monkey’s curse to strike, even if it sometimes undercuts the tension with its own audacity. Perkins deftly balances these heavier undercurrents with a sense of humor, leaning into the absurdity of the premise while keeping the emotional stakes grounded.
Tonally, The Monkey walks a fine line between horror and dark comedy. Cinematographer Nico Aguilar’s slick, saturated visuals contrast with the grim subject matter, while editors Graham Fortin and Greg Ng (both returning from Longlegs) keep the pacing tight, ensuring the film’s lean 98-minute runtime never overstays its welcome.
Unlike the Final Destination films, which went to painstaking lengths to tease out the impending deaths and generate some horror tension, Perkins doesn’t really seem to care about building suspense. That’s a valid choice, and instead of generating terror, The Monkey shocks us with its sudden ultra-violence: the next explosive death might be right around the corner.
But the film also falters in the few scenes where it does attempt to draw out the suspense. The Monkey climaxes with a kind of Rube Goldberg trap built by Bill, but lacks the spatial awareness for how to stage it; we never have a good handle on where the characters are in relation to the threatening objects depicted on screen, or how close the danger is—though the gory culmination certainly leaves a mark.
Beneath The Monkey‘s gleeful carnage lies a surprisingly personal meditation on grief and inevitability. The repeated line “Everybody dies, and that’s life” becomes more than a dark punchline; it reflects the film’s core thesis about the random, cruel nature of death—and perhaps the only way to cope is through laughter.
In a cinematic landscape crowded with self-serious elevated horror, The Monkey is refreshingly unpretentious. It’s a knowing, viciously funny take on the killer doll subgenre that pays homage to its pulp origins while offering a sly commentary on the inevitability of mortality. Perkins might not be reinventing the wheel here, but he’s finding new and inventive ways to crush it under the monkey’s cymbals.
