I do love a prologue that perfectly sets up the film it introduces, and one of the nicest ones I’ve seen lately is to be found in Osgood Perkins’ THE MONKEY, based on a short story by Stephen King and turned into an impudent horror film that is scary as hell and twice as funny. Maybe three times.
Our prologue involves Adam Scott as an anxious airline pilot (in full uniform) quietly desperate to unload a children’s toy on a diffident pawnshop owner (Shafin Karim). The toy, of course, is the drum-playing monkey animatron that will subsequently bring terror to the characters who cross its path. And a wicked looking thing it is with its huge glassy eyes and a rictus instead of a smile that splits its vaguely malevolent face in half. The shop owner is unimpressed by the monkey, and not particularly flummoxed by the seller being covered in blood. He’s similarly non-plussed by the way the pilot tells him in no uncertain terms to refrain from using the word “toy” because the monkey doesn’t like it. It’s right about then that the monkey begins to play its drum, something else about the pilot has given warning, with Scott chewing the scenery with increasing hysteria as very bad things happen. It’s not just the bloodletting; it’s the wonderfully intricate way it occurs that delights even as it disgusts. Hence, setting the perfect tone for the gore to come, which is cartoonish, yet still effectively icky. It is this prologue that establishes the rules of this particular corner of the horror universe. And though they are, as is de rigeur in these circumstances, few, they are seemingly impossible to keep, be it due to willful ignorance or human hubris.
It’s for the adolescent twins, Hal, the sweet one who narrates the film, and Bill, the one who provokes the world into wishing him a profound comeuppance, (both played with insightful nuance by Christian Convery as kids, and Theo James as adults) to work out what those rules are after they find the monkey among the knickknacks that their father, long disappeared from their lives, brought home from his world travels. They do, but not before a freak accident takes out their babysitter, and a rash wish removes their endearingly cynical mother, Lois (Tatiana Maslany), woman given to disturbing pronouncements as she tenderly nurtures her boys.
Instead of bonding, the tragedies, including landing in the custody of creepy Uncle Chip (Perkins with Elvis sideburns) and loopy Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy), put the twins even more at odds, leading to an estrangement that lingers into adulthood. Until the monkey reappears. That would be after the twins have not spoken in a decade or so after thinking that they had finally rid themselves of the cursed object. And when it reappears, it brings even more freak accidents to their small Maine town, only at a fiercely accelerated rate.
Perkins has a wickedly puckish way with terror, homing in on the absurd as the norm, and repeating tropes such as drumsticks spinning and the whirring sound accompanying it that maintains its own special aural menace. He establishes a droll, ahem, deadpan tone in which oddball characters wax philosophical, a stoner (Rohan Campbell) taunts the audience while menacing Hal with a revolver, a cleric (Nicco Del Rio) of tender years fails spectacularly in both etiquette and theology while delivering funeral sermons, and a real estate agent becomes a perfect embodiment of materialism divorced from the divine. There is a great deal of that ci-mentioned absurdity at play, but the exaggeration serves a higher purpose. It’s not just to amuse us in ways that might give us pause as we are tickled by the carnage, but also to speak to, and I kid you not, the futility of attempting to avoid generational trauma. That damn monkey is the externalization of same, and the fact that it cannot only teleport, but also cannot be destroyed with mere fire or knives says much about the effects of the trauma and its maddening propensity for propagating itself despite the best of intentions of each generation. And here Perkins finds a touching humanity in Hal’s dilemma, the one that makes him limit his visitations with his own adolescent son, Petey (Colin O’Brien) to one week per year for fear of the freak accidents that loom over him. For all the fun and games of finding ingeniously clever ways to kill people, Hal’s loneliness and isolation are the palpable subtext running throughout the story, and Bill’s descent into madness involving his oft-used funeral suit is a tragedy of what might have been (coupled with the nagging desire on the audience’s part for him to get what he deserves for his lifetime taunting of Hal). Perkins plays us like a fiddle. And it’s great.
As for those gruesome demises, they have the visual acuity of a perfectly delivered punch line. Events are clearly delineated without lingering too long, brevity being the soul of wit, and a premise never more skillfully demonstrated than here. They are part and parcel of the carefully composed scenes that offer an order that does not exist in the universe, the randomness of which is juxtaposed with the events depicted. Even the choice of camera angles, such as the drumstick’s point of view as it strikes literally and metaphorically, present a universe that is somehow aware, but one with which no argument can be made, no bargain struck. It may be random, but there is that sneaking feeling introduced that it is having a good time at the expense of, well, everyone. It is an immaculate depiction of despair.
THE MONKEY reminds us, none to subtly, that everyone dies. As Lois puts it to her sons as they grieve with ice cream cones over their babysitter. It’s not a matter of if or how, it’s a matter of when, even for her and for them. So, as she advises, you might as well dance as you embrace your fate. Or make a horror film that is the cinematic equivalent of whistling in a graveyard.
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