The Monkey (2025)

The Monkey arrives from 2025, a year in which the culture's appetite for instruction is at a historic peak, and yet Osgood Perkins has delivered a film about a wind-up toy that kills people with harpoons, wasps, and a trampling horse stampede. Theo James plays twin brothers, one of whom is bullied, one of whom attempts fraternal murder by cursed proxy, and the film treats neither as a case study. A hibachi chef decapitates a babysitter. A bowling ball inscribed with a dead mother's name finishes the job. At no point does anyone pause to explain what any of this means about power, identity, or the arrangement of society. The monkey drums. The bodies fall. The camera moves on.

There is grief here, plenty of it, and the film is honest about the specific damage of an absent father and a mother lost to a cursed object. That damage stays personal. The estrangement between Hal and his son is resolved with a suggestion of dancing, not a reckoning with systemic anything. Perkins has said in interviews that he wanted to make death feel absurd, pointless, and random, which is a thesis about mortality and not a thesis about justice. The comedy is broad and the gore is generous, and neither is deployed in service of a sermon. Elijah Wood appears as a new husband and is granted no ideological function whatsoever.

For the purposes of this classification, the ledger stays empty. No casting agenda, no gendered argument, no racial reckoning, no environmental lament, no class resentment, no body-image discourse, no neurodivergence framing, no historical revision, no lecturing. A horror comedy adapted from a 1980 Stephen King short story has elected to be about a monkey and the people it maims. It is a rarer vintage than the market currently supplies, and it tastes like nothing but blood and jokes.