The Monkey—Longlegs director Osgood Perkins’ latest horror film—is new in theaters. How are critics reacting to it?
The release of The Monkey comes just seven months after Longlegs—a serial killer thriller starring Maika Monroe and Nicolas Cage—instantly became a hit in theaters in July of 2024.
The logline for The Monkey reads, “When twin brothers find a mysterious wind-up monkey, a series of outrageous deaths tear their family apart. Twenty-five years later, the monkey begins a new killing spree forcing the estranged brothers to confront the cursed toy.”
Rated R, The Monkey stars Theo James as the adult version of the twin brothers Hal and Bill, while Christian Convery plays the brothers as young boys. Tatiana Maslany also stars in The Monkey as Hal and Bill’s mother, Lois, while Elijah Wood appears in a cameo as Ted, the new husband of Hal’s ex-wife (Laura Mennell). Colin O’Brien also stars in The Monkey as Hal’s teen son, Petey.
As of Friday, Rotten Tomatoes critics have given The Monkey a 79% “fresh” rating based on 154 reviews. The RT Critics Consensus for the film reads, “Cruelly clever with some unforgettably gory set pieces, The Monkey reaffirms director Osgood Perkins’ horror bona fides while revealing he also has a surprising—albeit sick—sense of humor.”
In addition, audiences have given The Monkey a 74% “fresh” rating on RT’s Popcornmeter based on 100-plus verified user ratings.
What Are Individual Critics Saying About ‘The Monkey’?
Among the top critics on RT giving The Monkey a “fresh” review is William Bibbiani of The Wrap, who calls the film a “sick and twisted work of comic genius where the punchlines punch so hard you’ll explode.”
Peter Travers of ABC News also liked The Monkey, writing, “Theo James plays twin brothers on the run from a toy monkey with blood-splattering murder on its mind. Director Oz Perkins doesn’t disappoint with his ferociously funny take on Stephen King’s short story even if he never reaches the horror heights.”
Nick Schager of The Daily Beast also lauded The Monkey on RT, calling in a “unique saga of fathers, sons, and brothers, of fate, vengeance, and survival, and of a wind-up simian toy that just might be the Grim Reaper.”
Among The Monkey’s detractors on RT is Peter Howell, who writes in the Toronto Star, “With Perkins playing it all for grim laughs, The Monkey lacks any real sense of the consequences of human folly and the dangers of toying with fate.”
Jocelyn Noveck of The Associated Press also gives The Monkey a “rotten” review on RT, writing, “Does the blend work? That depends partly on how easy it is for you to laugh at cartoonish violence. But combining this with an exploration of brotherly ties and missing dads, as Perkins does, lends the enterprise an uneven feel.”
My take: The Monkey is so outrageously entertaining that it belongs among ranks of such horror comedy greats as Evil Dead 2 and the spinoff series Ash vs. Evil Dead from Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell and Rob Tapert.
The deaths at the hands of the wind-up toy in The Monkey are sometimes explosive—literally—but the violence is so cartoonish and over the top that you can’t help but laugh out loud at the purposeful lunacy. True, The Monkey is much different in tone from Osgood Perkins’ horror thriller Longlegs, but it is every bit as brilliant.
The Monkey opens in theaters nationwide on Friday.
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