by Adelaide Song on 2025-03-06.
Tags: film
Spoilers follow.
The Monkey (2025) is exactly as stupid as the goofy trailers and the Hardcore-parodying posters would lead you to believe. The premise is more or less a devolved version of Final Destination, in and of itself a pretty unserious franchise: you wind up The Monkey (2025) and it kills someone at random through ludicrously convoluted means.
From that alone, I went into this film hoping that this would be Oz Perkins full-sending it into campy comedy-horror, and to my delight that’s exactly what I got. In the opening five minutes of the movie, we see Petey Shelburn (Adam Scott) gleefully incinerate The Monkey (2025) with a flamethrower purloined from a dead pawn-shop owner, howling obscenities as its horrific visage melts under the heat of the flame. You could have probably stopped the movie there and I would have come out thinking that my ticket money was well-spent.
Instead, Perkins continues to spin the tale of Petey’s twin sons, Hal and Bill, and the absurd levels of misfortune The Monkey (2025) introduces into their lives as it pops up again and again. The film is fundamentally just a stress-test for one story beat—someone winds The Monkey (2025) and we sit, rapt, waiting for someone to get turned into particle effects—but Perkins throws so many bits of black comedy at you that it somehow doesn’t get old. I was shocked at how often deaths felt shocking in the film, despite the literal in-universe foreshadowing that someone was going to die. It takes a studied hand to mix up the timing and delivery so each new death still lands, and while there were still highs and lows, there were no straight-up duds in the lineup. It’s just a fact that people exploding into gibs is funny.
Somehow, despite coming for the wacky deaths, my favourite joke in the movie ended up being a random piece of background continuity. The Monkey (2025) sets a character’s head on fire so badly it scorches the ceiling. In every future shot we see in the same location, we see the trail of soot from their panicked flailing, hiding in the bokeh. (Nobody ever comments on it, otherwise it wouldn’t be funny.)
Talking about the movie’s plot feels kind of perfunctory, but unlike Longlegs (2024), you don’t get the same hollow feeling from the thinness of the story. I enjoyed that film a ton, but despite Monroe’s killer leading performance and a nauseatingly well-crafted atmosphere, it still felt like it was fighting its form as a police procedural.
No such conflict here. It’s a comedy, for one, and those are allowed to “just” be a vehicle for bits. What story is here also just doesn’t need to be that in-depth. If you have siblings, then you’ve definitely had moments where you’ve thought about killing them, and they’ve definitely thought the same of you. This is a myth they had in the Paleolithic era. The Monkey (2025) just serves as a neat little vehicle for the consequences of those darker impulses, and how they get taken out on others. Hal kills his mother trying to get to Bill; Bill ends up causing what I’m pretty sure is a personalized 9/11 trying to get to Hal in response. Again, sibling drama.
The fundamental simplicity of the story and unserious tone means you probably shouldn’t walk away from this film expecting some deep moral takeaway. The film’s posters are about as blunt as the film itself at delivering its core message: “Everybody dies, and that’s fucked up.” At the same time, I think Perkins does hit on something smarter than he lets on via the movie’s duelling tones.
There is something deeply real about the fever-dream world that The Monkey1 inhabits. In her videos about NSFL content, Nyx Fears talks about real-world violence feeling less real than violence in media. In my experience this rings true, both as a victim of domestic violence and as someone who was subject to some of the shock video culture that was around in the 00s and early 10s. It goes double if you spent your childhood in this environment: I have a lot of hazy memories of most of what happened to me, where I can’t be sure if I made stuff up after the fact or not.
The Monkey speaks to me because a lot of those fleeting memories are inherently ridiculous, are often bleakly hilarious in the sheer scale of their cruelty. That’s half the reason why I’m unsure they happened. Tying your five year-old to a kiddy chair and then taping chilli to their mouth sounds like something out of a skit about a Gitmo warden’s family, not an actual thing that happened to a real human being.
Perkins captures both that delirious haze and people’s relationship to it with shocking precision and nuance. You laugh because it’s the only thing you can do. Or do you laugh because it’s useful cover for the pain of the wound? Or is it just actually very fucking funny, and nobody else is going to let themselves laugh at it, so you might as well?
At the end of the day, don’t let my rambling sway you into thinking this is some kind of “elevated” B—movie, because it’s not. It’s a Troma film with less misogyny and more budget. It’s engineered to be a good time with friends and it revels in that fact. Like the best B-movies, though, its unabashed stupidity gives it a core of oddly compelling humanity, and that’s ultimately why I found it so charming.
The Monkey (2025) refers to The wind-up Monkey (2025) and not the film itself. ↩