Photo: Neon/Everett Collection
When the first scene of a movie involves a literal disembowelment, complete with visible intestines, Stand by Me is an unlikely point of reference. And yet, as The Monkey moves past its gutsy opening, it does start to recall the 1986 Rob Reiner film, based on the Stephen King novella The Body. Sure, it’s considerably bloodier, but The Monkey — adapted from another King work, the short story of the same name — is also a coming-of-age tale about young adolescent boys, twin brothers Hal and Bill (both played by Christian Convery), who are forced to confront the reality of death for the first time. There’s even a voice-over as an older Hal looks back at his traumatic childhood. In Osgood Perkins’s film, the narrator’s fixation is not on the dead body of a missing kid, but on a cursed monkey toy that kills a random person when the key in its back is turned and it starts to play the tiny drum in its lap.
The Monkey isn’t really a Stand by Me–esque coming-of-age story, though — that’s part of Perkins’s bait and switch. After a key-turn kills their mom (Tatiana Maslany) with a brain hemorrhage, Hal and Bill throw the monkey to the bottom of a well. The movie jumps forward from 1999 to the present, with an adult Hal, now played by Theo James, estranged from both his brother and his son, Petey (Colin O’Brien). Hal wants to live a quiet life, but he’s drawn back into chaos when the monkey reappears, offing poor Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy) in a series of accidents that really feel like overkill. (Fishhooks, fire, impalement: She goes through it.) Once Hal returns to the small town in Maine where he spent his teen years, determined to find and destroy the evil that haunted his youth, The Monkey becomes a lot closer to It: Chapter Two. Perkins, who wrote and directed the film, is clearly aware of the associations that audiences well versed in King adaptations will make, but he’s not just interested in paying homage. The closer you look at The Monkey, the more you can see its deliberate subversions of the tropes that have come to define the Stephen King movie.
In fact, there are moments when the movie flirts with parody. Perkins’s style is whimsical and sometimes surreal, which suggests we should not take any of this too seriously, no matter how high the body count. This also makes the references to certain King adaptation mainstays feel like deliberate ribbing. The bullying Hal endures in the first part of the film is comically heightened — he comes home covered in bananas at one point — a sillier version of the over-the-top bullying in Carrie. In the present day, there’s a punk called Thrasher, played by Halloween Ends’s Rohan Campbell, who feels decades out of date with a Ramones-adjacent ’70s-punk aesthetic, like the anachronistic high-schoolers of Christine but more consciously goofy. And at the funeral of Hal and Bill’s babysitter (Danica Dreyer), a monkey victim who dies in a horrifying hibachi accident, we learn her name is Annie Wilkes, like the antagonist in Misery. It’s an Easter egg, a staple of the modern era of King movies, but a completely nonsensical one. These bits of satire don’t betray a lack of respect for the films that came before The Monkey so much as an understanding that the King adaptation is in dire need of a refresh.
When it comes to King, we’ve broadly been there, done that — every time a new project is announced, you might find yourself asking how many more stories are even left to adapt. In recent years, there’s been a bottom-of-the-barrel quality to King movies; Perkins isn’t calling any specific films out, but I certainly will. The worst of these adaptations were retreads of existing movies, as was the case with the instantly forgettable Firestarter (2022), Children of the Corn (2020), and Salem’s Lot (2024). But lots of recent first-time adaptations weren’t exactly standouts either — you’d be hard-pressed to find fans of Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, dumped on Netflix in 2022, or 2023’s The Boogeyman, the rare wide theatrical release of the bunch. Whatever new golden age of King adaptations that seemed to emerge with the release of It in 2017 turns out to have been short-lived.
In terms of box office and (mixed to mildly positive) critical reception, The Boogeyman is the most successful of the recent King crop — The Life of Chuck, which earned good reviews out of TIFF, won’t hit theaters until this summer — but it’s also emblematic of an overarching problem that has weighed so many of these movies down. Many have been infected by a self-serious tone and a clunky earnestness, likely taking all the wrong lessons from successes like It and Doctor Sleep. Those movies were emotionally and thematically rich, but they were also, critically, a fun hang. The Boogeyman, on the other hand, takes a nasty little Stephen King story and turns it into yet another exploration of (Jamie Lee Curtis voice) trauma, where the title demon is a metaphor for grief. Mr. Harrigan’s Phone is an even more ponderous slog that trades all of the chills of the original novella for tears. Ultimately, it’s this feelings-first approach to King that The Monkey is pushing back on. Instead of dragging the source material down, Perkins ramps up the grotesqueness, absurdity, and laughs. The result is a much-needed reminder that King movies can be fun — and also, just as importantly, mean.
In terms of the basic plot, The Monkey has a lot in common with the short story it’s based on: Both are about an adult Hal trying to destroy the title object that killed his mother, largely to protect his son. Perkins takes a number of liberties with the specifics, but aside from playfully riffing on past King adaptations, his most notable change is in the monkey-driven accidents that claim so many lives. In the short story, people die falling out of a tree house or getting hit by a car. In the film, the monkey seems to have a flair for the dramatic, with frequent explosions of blood and viscera. In cranking up the nastiness, Perkins fills The Monkey with darkly comedic punch lines, as when a character loses his head shortly after a touching reconciliation. It’s a welcome return to the meanness you can find in plenty of King’s work, especially some of his earlier short stories, but it’s also an escalation that improves on the source material. These brutal rug-pulls aren’t dissimilar to the infamous ending to the 2007 King adaptation The Mist, which concludes with such a shocking “fuck you” to the characters and the audience that you almost have to laugh.
Perkins — just like Mist writer-director Frank Darabont before him — understands something crucial, which is that meanness and emotional honesty aren’t mutually exclusive. The Monkey works not by abandoning the pathos that has overwhelmed the recent sleepy King adaptations, but by finding a way there through parody and comically excessive violence. All of the very silly deaths reflect the uncomfortable truth that death is completely random: “It is what it is,” as Tatiana Maslany’s Lois tells her kids. That message lands better in a satirical comedy than it would if Perkins had gone with the film’s original script, which he “found really dopey” because it was “so about trauma,” he told Vulture in a July 2024 interview. Instead, Perkins made a version that skewers King convention and embraces splatter comedy, and it ended up more potent than any adaptation since Doctor Sleep. What a relief to discover there’s still life to be mined from works by our most adapted living author — sometimes it just takes a lot of death to find it.
