Review: The Monkey (2025)

“Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” So goes the Imposition of Ashes that marked the less-evangelical devout yesterday. But those who desire a blunter statement on our impermanence this Lenten season need look no further than the tagline of the latest Stephen King adaptation, The Monkey: “Everybody dies.” 

Fresh from the success of Longlegs last summer, director Osgood Perkins has reteamed with indie powerhouse Neon for his latest foray into horror–the story of two brothers struggling to rid themselves of a cursed organ grinder monkey toy that has instigated the demise of innocent victims for generations in ways so joyously demented they make Saw and Final Destination seem like low-tier fanfic.

The Monkey’s appeal lies in its melding of comedy and horror, an astounding balancing act of gallows humor that leaves its images of carnage etched into one’s mind for weeks whether or not they want them there. But Perkins is no gorno huckster. Like Hitchock and Lynch before him, he uses the genre to wrestle with his own place in the Amerian landscape, a space, in Perkins’s case, weighed down by his Psycho star father succumbing to AIDS and his mother, Berry Berenson, dying while aboard American Airlines Flight 11 on 9/11 in the director’s formidable years. 

Though reading The Monkey as a way for Perkins to work out grief seems a little pat, the absurdity of orphanhood by two of the Long 90s most epochal events looms large in his approach to the material. King’s story derives its horror from father-son anxieties, but Perkins has turned its source material’s Freud-meets-Poe approach to evil into a generational saga about personal responsibility in the face of the inevitable end. He might want us to laugh, but he also refuses to absolve his audience of its appetite for violent spectacle. The Monkey may remind us that we will all meet the same fate, but it has a full throated-belief that we may as well do so on our own terms.

The Monkey is now playing in theaters.