Adapted from a short story by Stephen King that plays around with themes and ideas inherited from The Monkey's Paw, writer-director Osgood Perkins' The Monkey wrings any last remaining fragment of wish-fulfilment out of WW Jacobs' original, finger curling tale. Perkins' take then not so much a cautionary yarn about attempting to interfere with fate but rather a funhouse ride through which is transmitted a relentless, and hilariously arranged, kind of syrupy malevolence. We are never more than a couple of minutes removed from a body detonating into a flowering, ruby viscera. And how! Actors Christian Convery and Theo James both pull double-duty as a pair of twins seen at two, disconnected eras in their lives. We see the Shelburn boys as infighting children and estranged adults, both stages of life stained by a clattering toy monkey whose frantic drum playing foretells a swift and impending doom. Unusually, it is the younger of the two actors who gets to play more of the depressive trauma generated by such a horrifying object. The young Convery ably assisted here by Tatiana Maslany's turn as the twins' single mother. Comparatively, as an adult, James is able to lean into the numbed, ironic distance that his character has used to cope with having meddled with such unwieldy power. To everybody's credit these two fragments marry together well, with James comfortable and amusing in the role of the frustrated patsy who sits rocking at the centre of this comedy. Perkins' film may be episodic and dramatically slight but it moves like the clappers; the basic shape of this story could easily be moulded into a The Outer Limits episode, or a Treehouse of Horror for that matter. Pretty high praise.
