The Monkey

Death doesn’t sting in this dark comedy.

Christian Convery in The Monkey. Image courtesy of NEON.

“Everybody dies, and that’s life,” says Lois (Tatiana Maslany) to her twin sons Hal and Bill (both played as preteens by Christian Convery) after a funeral. She then goes on to tell them that she will die, and they will die, and their friends and their friends’ parents and their beloved pets will all die too. It’s an uncomfortable truth, and the two brothers are just young enough that Lois’s speech grows darkly funny, then loops back around to being a little uncomfortable again. “Everybody dies,” she repeats, then concludes with: “To hell with it. Let’s go dancing.” Her words sum up The Monkey’s attitude toward death: we all have to deal with it, so we might as well enjoy life on our way to the end. The movie wobbles on the edge of poor taste in its gleefulness about its gruesome deaths … but still, it’s funny.

The Monkey laughs at death, and it grabs our arm and urges us to do the same through scene after scene of freak accidents: a woman losing her head to a sharp knife at a Japanese steakhouse, a harpooning in a pawnshop, an extended sequence involving rubbing alcohol and a gas leak (that last one results in a scorch mark along the ceiling in a later scene, a background touch that the characters never comment on and that made me start giggling when I saw it). Tonally the film is miles away from director Osgood Perkins’ previous movie Longlegs, which flirted with death but took itself seriously with an unflinching grimness. The Monkey wants you to flinch and then laugh; it’s a horror comedy, with an emphasis on the comedy. If you’ve got the stomach for its gruesome deaths, there’s no real horror to be found at all.

There isn’t too much of a plot, either. As children, Hal and Bill discover a toy monkey among their absent father’s things, the kind of creepy artifact that has the same visual connotations of a clown or a cut-rate 1950s cartoon. It may have been whimsical once, but now the thing just screams danger. When the boys wind the key in the monkey’s back, it lifts a pair of drumsticks and plays a tune before rattling a beat on its attached toy drum. The boys quickly realize that whenever the monkey plays its drums, someone nearby will die in a freak accident.

“Chances were one in forty-four million,” narrates Bill about one of the deaths the monkey caused, “which is to say, it has to happen to somebody.” The rest of the movie revels in the freakiness of its “accidental” deaths. Death comes for us all, as Lois told her sons; it’s just that these deaths happen to be the weird ones. Perkins and company take delight in staging each setpiece, the deaths spaced out into a rhythm like the beat of the monkey’s drum. Any character growth on the part of the boys—who grow up into men, both played by Theo James—has to do with accepting the fact that death is in fact a part of life. It’s something we can meet with grace and defiance—like Lois suggesting that they all go dancing—to channel some defiant joy in the face of an inevitable end. Death is going to be undignified, anyway. The movie doesn’t quite stick the landing, but to be fair, neither will we. We might as well laugh during the ride.—Sarah Welch-Larson

★★★☆

The Monkey is in theaters now.