The Monkey

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• Nuwan Anuradha 2025-09-08 10:25:45

  The Monkey unfolds as a surreal and wickedly absurd tapestry of horror and dark humor, welded together by Osgood Perkins' precise vision and a story rooted in Stephen King’s famously unsettling short tale. It begins with a man already broken, haunted by memory and standing over the wreckage of his own life—a life uprooted by a small toy monkey in red pants that banged cymbals and left devastation in its wake. That chilling opening sequence serves as more than just a prologue—it establishes both the tone and the promise that no sentimental expectation will survive once the monkey's key is wound. Twenty-five years later, the tale of Hal and Bill Shelburn unfolds, starting in a childhood home where the toy emerges from the attic like a remnant of misbegotten inheritance. As the brothers turn the monkey’s key, the clicking rhythm counts down to horrifying accidents— accidents so bizarrely violent that they blur the line between nightmare and slapstick. Perkins does not hold back: each death is an exploding crescendo of absurd gore, a visual and emotional gut-punch that folds self-aware humor into the carnage. What is striking is the way these grotesque events are grounded in familial and psychological reality—these are not random victims, but the Shelburn family, ripped apart not only by the curse but by their shared trauma.
  
  Hal and Bill, portrayed as children by Christian Convery and as adults by Theo James, become dual facets of kinship fractured under supernatural burden. Their arc is at once tragic and comedic, rooted in sibling rivalry, estrangement, and guilt. As adults, they are forced to reunite when the pattern of death resumes—an ominous signal that unresolved trauma cannot be buried, no matter how deeply. Their mother, played by Tatiana Maslany, is not spared—her own brush with the toy monkey leaves emotional scars that ripple across time and surface only in haunted dreams and nervous twitch. The film does not treat her grief as melodrama; instead, it subtly shades maternal resilience under the absurd horror of losing children to something as ludicrous as a drumming toy. The story flows through flashbacks and memories, each memory tinted by the grotesque violence it recalls, each flashback a fragment of a familial collage gone awry—parents battling to discard the monkey, boys instinctively acting out fear, memories of it buried in wells and boxed in attics, only to return again, unstoppable in its malicious purpose.
  
  As the body count rises across decades, Perkins layers in grotesque humor—the kind that contorts laughter into nausea. One moment the brothers are debating divorce papers, the next they're trying to rationalize how their once broken toy monkey is now a slasher in toy form. The tension between wanting to treat the story seriously and embracing its inherent ridiculousness fuels each scene. The cinematography reinforces this duality—mundane living rooms become stages of absurd carnage; ordinary toys become agents of chaos. The toy monkey isn't CGI; it's tangible, animatronic, real—making its killings all the more viscerally disturbing. Behind every ghastly death lies a whispered moral: innocence—with just the right amount of cynicism—can be weaponized. Perkins and King collaborate to let the monkey be both clown and executioner, a symbol of unchecked childhood (and adult) curiosity turned deadly.
  
  In the latter act, the film finds its emotional center. With Hal separated from Bill, their lives diverging until shared nightmare drags them back together, the story poses questions about confronting cursed legacies. Can one sever ties with family trauma by physically destroying its symbol? When the brothers attempt to rid themselves of the monkey, they throw it down a well—but the act only yields temporary relief. The monkey returns, not as a mechanical curiosity, but as a palpable force of retribution. And so Hal, with his teenage son Petey (played by Colin O'Brien), must face not only the toy but the burden of legacy. Petey stands as a final generation—innocent, terrified, yet necessary to the arc toward redemption or annihilation. The narrative tightens as the monkey's absurdity becomes metaphoric for inherited trauma—violent, passed down, and incomprehensible to the unprepared mind.
  
  When The Monkey reached theaters on February 21, 2025, it did more than entertain—it unsettled. The trailer, banned by four major TV networks for “excessive violence,” only amplified its rumor-shrouded allure. Viewers entering the theater were warned: this would not be your typical haunted object film. At the box office, rooting for R-rated indie horror paid off: it grossed nearly $70 million worldwide on a $10–11 million budget, making it one of the most profitable horror comedies of the year and the highest-grossing horror release so far in 2025. Critics were divided. Some praised its “cruelly clever” execution and “unforgettably gory set pieces,” while others found its tone smug, nihilistic, and lacking restraint—King’s eerie soul buried beneath neon-bright blood spray and deadpan comic timing. Audiences split—some delighted in its absurdity and gruesome creativity, others found it miscalculated or misaligned with King’s more earnest terror. Still, the consensus stands: The Monkey lives where horror meets dark comedy, where family drama meets cursed nostalgia, and where a toy’s unwinding key can unravel generations.
  
  Ultimately, The Monkey lingers in memory for its willingness to push horror into realms of dark laughter and familial reflection. It offers no tidy closure, only the view that some legacies—like cursed toys—can’t be truly buried. Still, in its absurd carnage, the film asks us to consider how childhood relics, long forgotten, might still be waiting for a turn of the key—and that sometimes, forgetting isn’t enough to escape the past.

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