Hal Kitchen
The success of Stephen King lies in the twin pillars of his writing, the first being a liberal interrogation of the role of masculinity in a twentieth century where established tenets of security and respectability are collapsing. His stories are full of mistrust of organized religion, the military, the authorities and the nuclear family, and instead offer tragic tales of imperiled individuals searching for solace in communities forged by mutual understanding and shared dire need. The second pillar is that they are bloody good fun. Obviously these two attributes exist on a scale, with something like Dolores Claiborne on the less-fun and more angry at dad end, and Maximum Overdrive at peak ’80s nose powder excess, but everything King has penned has gone some element of both those core appeals down.
With The Monkey, you get something approaching Stephen King Bingo. You have the adolescent trauma, the teenage bullies, the underachieving estranged father, the absentee dad, the dead mom, the cursed object, the small town weirdos, the ’80s cult of the individual satire, the biblical undertones, and of course the greatest nightmare of all…living in Maine. The Monkey is clearly a story concept borne out of those tall tales of improbable accidents that befell the someone of a somebody in your home town.
“You know Arnie McDuff’s brother? Well apparently he said that their cousin’s stepbrother got his kidney ripped out by a crow while he was sittin’ in their hot tub!”
“Wow! No foolin’?”
“Yep, bled out right there in the back yard, Arnie said they had to fish his larynx out of the filter cause he coughed it up when he screamed.”
The Monkey follows Hal (Christian Convery), who discovers among his deadbeat father’s possessions, an organ grinder monkey that causes violent accidents. After discovering the curse, he and his bully twin brother Bill (also Christian Convery) decide to dispose of the haunted object, but twenty five years later, the brothers (now played by Theo James) have to reunite to destroy it once and for all, before it places Hal’s estranged son Petey (Colin O’Brien) in its hairy crosshairs. It’s a very silly plot and the execution is even sillier. The Monkey will not be for all tastes, it is very, very much a horror comedy, the deaths are all varying degrees of preposterous and usually involve someone exploding.
Someone else whose work has split the difference between existential, sentimental tragedy and unhinged, macabre humor is Osgood Perkins, who follows up his success with last year’s runaway hit Longlegs with this decidedly more lighthearted offering. I have personally struggled with liking Perkins’s films as much as I want to; I think one of my most contrarian opinions ever is that his best film is Gretel & Hansel. Longlegs had phenomenal buildup but a weak payoff, and The Blackcoat’s Daughter had a great payoff but confusing and directionless buildup. If there’s ever a writer who could handle the nuts and bolts for him and leave him to handle the theatrics it’s King and Perkins’s absurdist tone illustrates a clear understanding of both of those core appeals I mentioned. Also his cameo as Uncle Chip might be the best part of the whole film.
The other performances are mostly really good too. Both James and Convery do astonishingly good work in their dual roles as Hal and Bill, I genuinely would’ve believed in both cases that different actors were playing each of them. Tatiana Maslany and Adam Scott are both terrific as the boys’ dysfunctional parents and Halloween Ends’s Rohan Campbell is very funny as local waster Ricky. Elijah Wood is admittedly quite distracting in a strange and unfocused characterization as Hal’s paternal rival and speaking of Hal’s son, I wasn’t ever particularly convinced by O’Brien in this part. His characterization calls for a lot of deadpan delivery and it never quite came off.
I’ll admit, I do think that The Monkey is often a bit too wacky for its own good. Longlegs mostly kept its humor subtle and tinged with instability, you didn’t know whether to be chilled to the bone by Cage’s performance or simply laugh at it. But The Monkey is a comedy, with a lot of outright silliness, and when you introduce such silliness into a film you’re acknowledging that this is something you’ve made with the intention of amusing the viewer, effectively breaking the fourth wall and shattering their immersion in the story you’re telling. Which is fine, when the joke is funny enough to justify the damage it does to the integrity of the story, but when it’s not, you’ve just shattered the viewer’s immersion for no good reason.
Not every joke is going to land and a fair amount of them still do, but personally I’d rather see a film that is able to work on both levels simultaneously rather than alternately. That’s because I do think there’s a genuinely really solid story here about how we choose to face the unpredictability of life and death. Do we try against hope to control what happens, grind our axes and obsess over protecting our loved ones, or do we face our fates with a Taoist shrug and a “que sera sera“? How random and chaotic it all feels is very much a part of that message, this is a world that will not succumb to our control and to some extent we need to accept that. It is nihilistic but also rather humane, the cost of any human connection is losing that connection in the end, but it’s always worth paying.
