Film Review: THE MONKEY (2025): Osgood Perkins Suffers a Sophomore Slump with His Follow-Up to LONGLEGS

The Monkey Review

The Monkey (2025) Film Review, a movie directed by Osgood Perkins, written by Osgood Perkins and Stephen King and starring Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Christian Convery, Rohan Campbell, Colin O’Brien, Elijah Wood, Sarah Levy, Osgood Perkins, Tess Degenstein, Danica Dreyer, Kingston Chan, Zia Newton, Shafin Karim, Lumen Beltran, Laura Mennell and Janet Kidder.

Stephen King’s tales of terror are an acquired taste. For me, having grown up on films based on his books, his didactic tales of horror feel a little dated when watching them in 2025. In director Osgood Perkins’ follow-up to the sensationally frightening, Longlegs, we get to see a variation on themes from the Final Destination pictures which uses a monkey as a metaphor for the fact that death is coming for all of us. It’s only a matter of time. Yes, the film is actually called The Monkey which shows how much thought went into all this. I was scared by the monkey which the film makes clear is not a toy even though it looks like one who beats its cymbals together and drops its hand as a sign someone is about to die. Unfortunately, despite a strong opening, the movie goes off the tracks half-way through which leads to a disappointing resolution.

This film’s story opens in 1999 with the tale of a couple of twin brothers played by Christian Convery. They’re named Hal and Bill. Let me back up a bit. An earlier establishing scene shows their dad drop the monkey off at a pawn shop where the store worker makes clear there’s no return on kids’ toys, but the monkey ends up ripping the clerk’s guts out in a gruesome scenario. Hal and Bill’s mom, Lois, is excellently portrayed by Tatiana Maslany. She loves her kids and bakes for them from time to time. Hal’s the good twin and Bill’s the bad twin, so to say. Hal hates Bill and wants him to die but the monkey that seemingly causes certain death chooses other victims such as their babysitter (Danica Dreyer) and, eventually, Lois, herself.

Hal is picked on as a kid by a group of kid bullies at school who take his pants from him at one point. We feel sorry for him, especially since his brother is equally cruel. Skip ahead 25 years, and we feel even more sorry for him as he is now a grocery store clerk (played tremendously well by Theo James) looking to take some time off to spend with his estranged son (Colin O’Brien). A series of convoluted events occur that bring the monkey back from the well in which Hal had left it years back. You may be able to escape the monkey (i.e. death) for a little while but eventually, the evil force will come back to haunt the living you know what out of you.

The Monkey runs out of steam pretty quickly when it’s in the time period it gets comfortable in. A lady gets pins in her eyes and her face sets on fire and other similarly graphic deaths happen that make one queasy when watching them. This plot about Hal and his kid, Petey, staying in a motel is rather tepid when considering how boring it all is. There’s a couple of side characters like Ricky (Rohan Campbell), a kid with too much hair who looks like he’s impersonating Joaquin Phoenix in his early years as he comes in contact with the aforementioned monkey referred to in the film’s title.

There’s also Petey’s mom (Laura Mennell) and her new lover, Ted (Elijah Wood, wasted here), who plan to take Petey away from Hal. Bill comes back into the picture, too, and there’s a few too many plot twists thrown in willy nilly that feel like the writers are making them up on the spot with no clear goal in mind other than to cause characters’ deaths at the helm of the evil monkey the film effectively portrays as wickedly dire.

Perkins can stage good scenes of scariness, especially in the earlier stages of the picture. He can also provide humor as well such as when a priest talks about the decapitated babysitter at a funeral in a haphazard way. Perkins is very talented as evidenced by the gruesomely successful Nicolas Cage hit, Longlegs. He gets a great dual turn in The Monkey from star Theo James as the adult brothers and even solid work from Christian Convery who has a very difficult set of roles to play. What does it all mean, though? King’s story feels dated and like it’s been done before, only better. What we’re left with is a movie with sporadic entertainment value that is rather flat on its surface and lacks truly fascinating plot development.

Tatiana Maslany, as the mom, has a lot of appeal and makes the earlier sequences here tolerable as opposed to the later ones with the annoying character Campbell plays taking center stage. Elijah Wood is the biggest disappointment, though, as the book writing self-help guy trying to take Hal’s son away. Wood is simply overacting here and doesn’t convince the viewer much that he is playing a real person. King’s overall writing here is closer to his work on the threadbare Maximum Overdrive than his masterworks Cujo or Christine.

In the end, The Monkey, gets a rating slightly better than it deserves thanks to the monkey itself.  They created a really frightening and creepy MacGuffin of sorts. It’s in search of a better script, though. Death may be coming for us all at some point and a fake monkey could be behind it all, but this film doesn’t make its concept stand out from the pack with several cardboard characterizations and disappointingly convoluted death scenes.

Rating: 6/10

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