Filmmakers tinker with the question of tone from project to project, many not as much as they should. But writer-director Osgood Perkins has no problem with tonal adjustment.
His recent and most popular feature, last year’s “Longlegs,” worked in a sustained register of steady, clammy, creepily effective dread. Perkins makes a hard left into merrily grotesque slapstick with his new film, his fifth, “The Monkey.” The knob has been turned to a distinctly different tonal setting: Merry death, dismemberment and nicely timed sight gags, rolling along, with a dash of sincere parent/child bonding.
Essentially a series of sketch-comedy illustrations of how many ways you can kill off your cast members, “The Monkey” comes from Stephen King’s 1980 short story. The psychic link between King and Perkins is childhood trauma, passed from generation to generation. As kids, identical twins Hal and Bill (both played by Christian Convery) are raised by their mother (Tatiana Maslany). Their vagabond wastrel of a father (Adam Scott, in a prologue cameo), long out of the picture, has left behind some trinkets and mementos, including one bad-intentioned toy monkey, not a cymbal-crasher as in King’s story but a drummer with a vengeance.
Each time the monkey’s mechanical key is turned, someone — anyone, seemingly at random, besides the key-turner — dies in spectacularly awful fashion. The younger of the twins, bullied persistently by his three-hours-older brother, has enough sadness and human difficulty in his life without all the adults in the boys’ orbit expiring, violently. First, it’s the boys’ babysitter (beheaded at a Japanese steakhouse), then mom (explosive aneurysm while frosting a cake), then the boys’ aunt and uncle, the latter played, amusingly and briefly, by director Perkins.
A generation after the boys drop the killer mechanical percussionist down a well, it’s 2024, the monkey’s back, and Theo James takes over the roles of grown-up and now-estranged Hal and Bill. Throughout “The Monkey,” director Perkins carries over certain visual strategies from his earlier work: the slow, ’70s-style zooms and, more sparingly, dissolves; the “gotcha!” surprise element of his most judicious shock cuts, played mostly for laughs here.
Is the mixture of frolic and earnestness wholly successful? No, but calling “The Monkey” tonally uncertain is inaccurate, I think. It’s confident in its mood swings. James and young Colin O’Brien, very effective as Hal’s son, Petey, strive for realistic emotional stakes with just the right hint of irony, as beleagured father and guarded son try to make sense of their fragile relationship amid a parade of random eviscerations, electrocutions and face-meltings.
Some of the killings in this spree are a drag: unpleasant, without the funny part, one involving Sarah Levy of “Schitt’s Creek” and a for-sale sign. Even so, and even with structural echoes of the “Final Destination” movies, “The Monkey” suggests little of that franchise’s rote determinism. Perkins gives us the randomness of extraordinarily bad fortune and, for a lucky few, the value of a hardy survival instinct.
In various interviews, the filmmaker has told his own story again and again. By age 27, he had lost his father (actor Anthony Perkins) to AIDS, after a closeted bisexual life, and his mother (actress and photographer Berry Berenson) on Sept. 11, 2001. He has been working through all that ever since. While I hope Perkins doesn’t lean into jokey sadism as a dominant creative impulse — we have too many jokey sadists with movie deals as is — “The Monkey” asserts his stealth versatility as well as his confident technique. Perkins rarely lingers on the worst of what we see; his editors, Graham Fortin and Greg Ng, have genuine comic timing.
This may be the least faithful Stephen King adaptation on record, but fidelity to the source material only gets a filmmaker so far.
“The Monkey” — 3 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for strong bloody violent content, gore, language throughout and some sexual references)
Running time: 1:38
How to watch: Premieres in theaters Feb. 20
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
