Stephen King adaptation The Monkey is a sick joke

"Like life," is the warning that arrives with The Monkey's titular stuffed animal, the words emblazoned on a hat box tween twins Hal and Bill (both played by Canadian Christian Convery at his most Parent Trap) find in their basement. 

No, not "lifelike" — the grinning, drum-bashing wind-up toy is very specifically "like life." And as Hal winds it up — as the monkey's demon drum sticks come banging down for the first time — we see why. 

Like a curse, its playing metes out random, gore-happy violence to the hapless citizens surrounding it. Babysitters are decapitated. Mothers' eyes bleed from explosive brain haemorrhages. Immolated aunts trip face-first into cheery lawn signs. 

Death happens, and as the boys grow into adulthood (both played by Theo James), death follows Hal like a vengeful ghost. 

But it's not vengeful, not really. In Stephen King's short story, on which The Monkey is based, a charitable read is that King uses the monkey to show that what seems like evil is really misfortune, and its blind strikes are as random and elemental as lightning.

Or in other words, as King's character muses: "most evil might be very much like a monkey full of clockwork that you wind up; the clockwork turns, the cymbals begin to beat, the teeth grin, the stupid glass eyes laugh... or appear to laugh...."

At least, that's what director Osgood Perkins' adaptation The Monkey wants to say. Instead, what it turns out to be is something more like a personification of its demon than an examination of it — perhaps because King and Perkins may just be the two worst possible creatives to bring together. 

There is King: a masterful and prolific storyteller, with a dogged and occasionally fuzzy handling of his own themes. The kind of writer who will write an accidental self-recrimination of an alcoholic author in The Shining, see and hate the improvement and crystallization in director Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation so much he releases his own TV miniseries remake (sneeringly billed Stephen King's The Shining). In it, he turns that character into a clumsy, blood-drenched hero, alternatively martyring himself for his family and screaming to his son about the benefits of "managerial timber." 

And there is Perkins: an auteur filmmaker with a singular vision — as well as the technical acuity to pull off incredible visuals on par with The Lighthouse and The Witch director Robert Eggers. Unfortunately, in Perkins's case it's a myopic ability to recreate that moody aesthetic in something like his 2024 film Longlegs, then dash it all whenever the title character — and the only original aspect of his filmmaking — makes its deeply silly, and distractingly off-colour appearances onscreen. 

Bring the two together, and you get The Monkey. Adapted from a screenplay by horror aficionado James Wan that Perkins originally felt was too dark, the result is a mix of both King's and Perkins's worst qualities. 

Mix of gore and groaners

Perkins seemingly tries to remedy this by adding levity, however it feels like the kind a giggling kid burning ants with a magnifying glass might suggest. And the result is a tonally confused story of both redemption and nihilism, its comedy sapped of almost anything resembling humour. Meanwhile, King's already half-baked original message is only further diluted by Perkins' inconsistent doubling down on it. 

That said, The Monkey is peppered with original moments: Adam Scott as the panicked father trying to offload, then off the monkey with a flamethrower; a seemingly weed-hazed priest stumbling through a "that sucks, man" eulogy (Burnaby, B.C.'s Nicco Del Rio); and a bizarre vape-inspired kill are all chuckle-worthy, if completely superfluous. 

But as we wade through the hokey bullied-boyhood-nostalgia omnipresent in King works, the conceit starts to wear thin. Especially so as the 1999 awe-shucks, Maine-hell we inhabit here is even more obviously shallow when it's dressed up in JNCOs. Modernizing the plot by having the mopey-eyed kid bullied by a lisping preteen girl instead of a muscle-head jock doesn't do much to improve anything.

This is mostly Perkins's invention, but it also leads to a jarring bifurcation of the plot when Hal grows up. The film suddenly switches from coming-of-age tale to be about a sulking father at odds with his own potentially doomed son. It also suddenly veers with a twist that is somehow just as ridiculous as it is unfunny.

The split gives Perkins the opportunity to stretch the two points of Hal's life, seemingly to set up more and more occasions for Rube Goldberg death machines, and occasionally amble back toward some semblance of a constantly changing message. 

Can misfortune ever truly be avoided? Let's watch a man get trampled to death inside a sleeping bag. What is more valuable, loyalty or revenge? Look, a guy skewered by a harpoon. Yada yada, something about social media, true crime and voyeurism. It doesn't have anything to do with the plot, but maybe throw a school bus full of dead cheerleaders in there to — wait, surprise shotgun kill!

Cadillac without an engine 

Based on a supposed lack of character growth in Kubrick's The Shining, King often described the movie as "a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it." Judging by The Monkey not only lacking that growth, but exhibiting a pointed disregard for characterization, it's hard to imagine why he wouldn't say the same here.

It's all a grouchy, half-dead approximation of Evil Dead-antics, a kind of dead-eyed carousel of pessimistic dourness that starts out thrilling, and quickly swan dives into boring for the fact that there's nothing under the hood, no real message or even originality in delivering and redelivering the spectacle. The Monkey is not a Cadillac without an engine; it's a rusty clown car running in a closed garage.       

That's not to say The Monkey is an abject failure. James stretches some impressive acting chops, and Convery does what he can with the woe-is-me middle-schooler trope. 

But judging by the quality, it's understandable this is a movie Perkins shaped to his liking and King wholeheartedly approved. Both are celebrated horror hands, always ready to crank up the gore to get a reaction. And both are, at times, more inclined to grab at spooky-sounding iconography without concern for how they impact — or even destroy — the story.