The Monkey — Laughing at the Funeral

Osgood Perkins turns grief into a punchline, then tells it sixty more times and waits for you to notice.

A wind-up monkey bangs a little drum. Somewhere, a person dies. Not bravely, not meaningfully. Hideously, at random, in a way nobody could have seen coming and nobody could have stopped. That is the whole mechanism of The Monkey, and Osgood Perkins cranks it the way a kid cranks a new toy: again, faster, again, hunting for the point where it breaks.

The deaths are the draw, and Perkins knows it. They arrive as elaborate, escalating Rube Goldberg catastrophes, each one a small gory vaudeville act, each one built for a laugh before a scream. If you walked in expecting the slow, sick creep of Longlegs, the film Perkins made right before this one, you are at the wrong window. This is splatstick. This is a cartoon about mortality. And the swerve has thrown people, because from a distance it looks like a director walking away from the mode that made him interesting so he can sell gross-out gags to a bigger room.

That is not what happened. What happened is that Perkins kept making the same movie and changed the lighting.

Longlegs and The Monkey are both about death and family. Both are about the thing a parent leaves behind inside a child. And Perkins has been open about where that comes from, in a way that reframes everything on screen: his father, Anthony Perkins, died when Oz was eighteen. His mother died on one of the planes on September 11th. He has said that everything he makes comes back to family, and that death and humor are, for him, intimately linked. So look at what this film actually is. A cursed inheritance that kills the people around you whether you want it to or not, made by a man who knows exactly what it means to inherit a death you did not ask for and cannot give back. The line that lands hardest in the whole picture is a character’s offhand mention of “evil stuff from my dad.” That is the autobiography poking up through the splatter. The monkey is what the father left behind. The movie is about being the kid who has to keep it in a box.

Here is the one personal thing this review has earned, because the film runs on a mechanism I know from the inside. Sixteen years sober, I know the exact texture of the joke you crack at the worst possible moment. The laugh and the wound land on the same beat, and not because the wound is funny. The laugh is what makes the wound survivable. It is the pressure valve that lets you stay in the room with the unbearable thing instead of leaving your own life. That is the frequency Perkins is broadcasting on, and when The Monkey works, it works right there: in the place where grief and the gag are not opposites but the same gesture, where you laugh at the funeral because the alternative is to stop functioning. The tonal whiplash some audiences have called a flaw, the lurch from real loss into slapstick carnage and back, is at its best the truest thing in the film. That lurch is what grief feels like from inside. The movie will not let you settle into mourning or into comedy, because the man who made it was never allowed to settle into either one, and the squirming it produces in a crowd is the point of the exercise.

Theo James is the secret weapon. He plays twin brothers across a lifetime, one eaten alive by the curse, the other trying to outrun it, and he gives the two of them genuinely distinct nervous systems. That is a real performance tucked inside a movie that mostly treats its supporting cast as elaborate delivery systems for death gags. James is the human ballast. He keeps the thing tethered to feeling even as the bodies stack up in ever more ridiculous ways, and without him the picture would float off into pure cartoon.

And yet. Death and the joke are the same gesture: that is a brilliant idea for a movie. A brilliant idea is not a brilliant movie, and the gap between the two is exactly the gap The Monkey keeps falling into. The problem is repetition without development. The film finds its one extraordinary note inside the first twenty minutes, death as punchline, grief as gag, and then it plays that note, and plays it, and plays it. Diminishing returns are merciless. The fifth elaborate kill lands softer than the first. The tenth lands softer than the fifth. By the back half, a gag that once carried real grief underneath it has become a machine stamping out gags, the wound sanded smooth by sheer frequency until what remains is splatter, punchline, wink. A grief comedy cannot just insist that grief and comedy rhyme. It has to take you somewhere. The rhyme has to deepen, complicate, cost more at the end than it did at the start. The Monkey mostly repeats itself louder. The swing is the point, sure. A point made forty times stops being a point and becomes a tic, and the film never quite learns the difference.

So I am divided, and I would rather say so than fake a clean verdict. I walked out loving this on instinct: the nerve, the autobiography under the gore, the confidence of a filmmaker who looks at the worst thing that ever happened to him and draws it as a cartoon. On reflection the love has cooled into respect with a real reservation attached. Perkins is one of the most genuinely interesting people working in horror, making personal films inside a form that mostly resists the personal, and even his wobbles beat most directors’ triumphs. The Monkey is a wobble. It is a great twenty-minute idea stretched across a feature, a profound joke told until it stops being profound, a film that knows exactly what grief feels like and mistakes saying so on repeat for going anywhere with it. The toy keeps banging the drum. Somebody keeps dying. Eventually you stop laughing, and not because it got too dark. It stopped finding anything new in the dark. The wound is real. The film just runs out of ways to keep it open.