Movie Review - THE MONKEY (2025)

THE MONKEY (2025)

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 Stars

The first big disappointment of 2025, Osgood Perkins' THE MONKEY is not the follow up to LONGLEGS that I hoped for or what the trailer promised us all. Another strong marketing campaign will drive people to this movie but unlike his fantastic serial killer thriller from last year, this one doesn't deliver.

The film's fatal flaw is its tone. Perkins tries for dark comedy when he should have stuck with pure darkness. What made LONGLEGS so effective was the atmosphere, the movie's aura so-to-speak. THE MONKEY's vibe is just odd; it wants to be quirky but feels forced, it wants the kind of morbid laughs the Coen Brothers know how to get (like shooting Brad Pitt point blank in the face) but the deaths aren't funny. One reason for that is the reliance on digital versus practical effects. Nearly every kill would be both funnier and scarier if they employed actual makeup effects. The existing ones look ridiculous and they're far too over-the-top. For some reason, Perkins thought having a woman get blown to bits by a simple double barrel shotgun or showing another chick explode into tiny pieces from an electro-shocked pool was a good idea but either effect would be more effective if it was closer to what would actually happen to a human body.

Based on the Stephen King source material, THE MONKEY also has a scattered, sloppy script. With weak dialog and under-developed characters, the cast suffers (some, like Elijah Wood, to an embarrassing level). Unlike some, I think Theo James does good work here but his efforts are wasted on the wrong movie. Take his part (at least his protagonist) and put him in a well-written, focused thriller about an evil monkey that kills everyone around him... you might have something. Sadly, this is a swing and a miss for Osgood Perkins but I'll still be in line to see his next one.

Watched at Yakima 10 Theaters in Yakima, Washington.

This review was also on my letterboxd account and will eventually be published on my Travis Mills filmmaker Facebook page