There’s an old curse cast on Hollywood: thou shalt never make a good Stephen King film adaptation. Well, it turns out someone finally mastered the third-level spell Counterspell, because The Monkey is gory, funny, and a manual on how to survive childhood with siblings, all rolled into one.
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Pitching itself as a dark horror comedy, in this gory delight of a film we follow Theo James’s Hal, a down-and-out survivor of a possessed, devil-spawned monkey toy that wreaked havoc on him during his formative years. Hal has a twin, Bill, who was a huge dickhead during their childhood, and has stayed true to his principles by remaining one into adulthood.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. There’s a monkey right there in the title. What’s that all about then? To understand why this particular monkey works so well, we need to talk about what makes it tick.
Batteries Not Included
In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve not actually read the Stephen King short story this 2025 movie is based on. We will mercifully skate right on past any comparisons to the source material. Is it faithful, or was there a miscarriage of justice in the screenwriting? I’ve no clue, but what I can talk about is that they made the right goddamn monkey for the film.
King really taught us fear when he wrote It. More, he taught us to fear clowns. Where we should have seen clowns at a childhood birthday party as a source of delight, his masterwork has taught us that they are evil incarnate and we should kill them with fire. He was silent on the matter of mimes, but in his effort to leave no childhood stone unturned, The Monkey leans into the question: what if wind-up toys could be sent right from the devil himself?
Well, as it turns out, a huge number of people will get murdered. The titular monkey is a manifestation of a devil’s bargain. The big plot device is that when it’s wound up, it will kill someone, and crucially, not the person who uses it. They get a pass on the next murder. However, the monkey doesn’t take requests—it’s not a late night radio DJ—and the murder mayhem spree that follows each turn of the crank is a delight to behold, not least of which because the people we want to die don’t, or at least, not in the order we hoped.
Delightful Horror, Divine Comedy
There have been a few S-tier horror comedies. Ready Or Not is a personal favourite, cementing Samara Weaving on my radar even more than her debut outing in The Babysitter—also a horror comedy. The woman has form. Shaun of the Dead and The Cabin in the Woods share some of this DNA, and it’s from this second one that The Monkey channels the same delightful charm.
And that word ‘delight’ is key here. The movie isn’t stuffed with tedious jump scares—you can totally hold a scalding cup of tea while watching it, without fear of fright-borne spillage. Its horror is born of what-if, not monster closets—the monster is, after all, right in front of us the whole time.
So, if the monster’s in full view, how does it pull off its prestige? The Monkeyuses comedy-meets-cleverness. Where Final Destination death montages can be wonderfully layered, I’d argue The Monkey’s are rich with room-based cleverness. It’s almost a game for the audience: is this a scene where someone can die, and if so, how’s that going to happen? The trailer shows us how a shotgun hidden in a closet can blow a person to pieces, so even if you think you’re safe, you’re… not. The beauty of these audience puzzles is that you will get some of them, but never all. The movie suggests its screenwriters should be in therapy through its inventive ways of offing people.
It will go down in history as the best positioning of a murder surfboard, for example.
Wind-Up Slaughter
None of this works if the villain isn’t effective. And the monkey oozes malice because of its clown-like smile (remember King’s first lesson?), but mostly because of its eyes. The props department made sure this damn thing could follow you with its stare no matter where on screen it is.
Sometimes the monkey is only hinted at—you’ll catch a glimpse of the top of its head in a dark basement, perhaps. Other moments it’s in full view, and you might wonder how it could ever be terrifying… right until someone gets taken apart like a bloody Lego kit. The monkey is never boring; it doesn’t use old hack methods like stuffing victims into a wood chipper.
That would be too pedestrian. It is perhaps at its most evil when you realise you can’t predict how it’s going to be evil.
Holding Out for a Hero
A great villain needs a great hero… and a great counter-villain.
The Monkey’s star power is excellently used here. We get to see Theo James as twins Hal and Bill, showcasing an amazing range we weren’t quite sure he had before this. While he’s been the something something handsome lead from Divergent through to The Gentlemen, The Monkey lets him play both misunderstood-but-possibly-likeable as well as purely-evil-and-psychotic. The best scene showing his range is toward the end, where we see Hal and Bill in the same moment. Can Theo James stick the landing when he’s being two sides of… himself? It turns out he most definitely can. It’s in the way Hal is uncertain in contrast to Bill’s confidence, or how Hal’s voice is slightly lower but without assurance, where Bill’s is certainty-fuelled mania. His great vocal work carries the performance beyond the hair and makeup, showing us his conflicted selves.
And he’s not alone. Christian Convery brings the younger versions of Hal and Bill to life, and does a similarly excellent job being two sides of the same coin. You would be mistaken for thinking they cast twins to play these two parts, but no: Convery is now an actor to watch.
And The Monkey doesn’t skimp on its cameos. We get pure fun from both Severance’s Adam Scott and Lord of the Rings’ Elijah Wood.
This movie wouldn’t work as well as it does without these performances married to a strong script with meticulous pacing. See, the execution of this flick risks all kinds of tedium, as we need both the splatter horror of the present day and the backstory that brought us here. I felt true fear when I realised the movie was going to take us through Hal and Bill’s childhood before we got the red juice out of their adulthood, but I shouldn’t have. The layering of the story, from how the monkey is discovered to be evil, the twins’ unearthing of it, and the deaths that follow, is perfectly timed. You won’t be dicking about on your phone waiting for the next scene to unfold.
Much of that comes down to a script where Hal and Bill sound totally different in terms of their use of language and how they refer to other people. This use of dialogue is part of the movie’s great conceit. The film mostly follows Hal; he’s the primary narrator of our journey, giving a noir voiceover in a sort of demon-spawned Blade Runner way. It uses this tight storytelling technique to explain the workings in the margins while getting the action rolling much faster.
It’s a clever trick I wish The Crow had learned: background exposition is tedious and boring, so you shouldn’t waste half your movie on it.
The script is tight, but it’s also satisfying: the conclusion leaves us in a really good place. The people who should die generally do, unfortunately alongside people who shouldn’t, but through gags like the skydiving company that does weddings, we get a total payoff.
And there isn’t a wasted line of dialogue.
Can Mayhem Have Meaning?
The Monkey delights, but it doesn’t fail to teach while it does so. There’s a metaphor the movie uses twins Hal and Bill to show us. They represent light and dark sides in all of us. The Monkey wants us to recognise we’re not angels or demons, purely positive or negative; we’re each a complete person with dark urges alongside heroic desires.
The dissection of Hal and Bill into two people lets us explore this more carefully, and dare I say thoughtfully in a movie that bulk-bought special effects blood. It allows us to understand how even good actions have bad consequences, just as bad actions have good ones. Finding meaning in life is left up to the experiencer, and if we can take a moment to forgive the bad and celebrate the good, maybe we don’t need a murder monkey at all.
What did you think of The Monkey? Let me know in the comments below. If you wouldn’t turn the crank, click Like! And if you would instead put the monkey into a furnace…
I have never seen the movie. But this review made me interested in it.