Twenty-five years later, Hal (Theo James) is estranged from Bill and has his own son, named Petey, but only sees him once a year. Fearing that anyone he’s too close to will somehow become the monkey’s victim, Hal leads a lonely life. But you cannot outrun a curse like that one.
Much of “The Monkey” hinges on James’s performance as older Hal, whom the people around him treat as a complete loser but who is likely the only one with a brain. It’s kind of a sustained joke, helped along by the fact that James looks like, well, a very handsome movie star, whereas everyone else in this town seems to have been left in the oven a little too long. Thus, while James’s performance is relatively unremarkable until near the end, it works: He’s just a guy who’s trying to live quietly, but life, and death, have other plans.
Adapted from a Stephen King short story, “The Monkey” is directed by Osgood Perkins, whose most recent film was last year’s disturbing, vibey horror hit “Longlegs.” I didn’t chuckle much during that viewing experience, but “The Monkey” is working in an entirely different register, though it feels like it’s spinning its wheels in the second act, which is mostly setup for the third. The movie’s presumption is that the more inventive the means of death — and the more quickly those means are visited upon the victim — the more they’ll provoke shocked laughter from the audience. At least in my screening, that was true.
The giddily ludicrous demises, doled out at random, are meant to balance out the darker themes in the film. There are two ideas stomping around in “The Monkey.” It is a parable of absent fathers and their estranged sons — more specifically, sons discovering that their fathers abandoned them not from a lack of love but from a desire to protect them from their own demons; the metaphor is made rather literal here. (While Perkins didn’t write the story himself, it’s worth noting, in the context of “The Monkey,” that his earliest acting role was in 1983’s “Psycho II,” playing a 12-year-old version of Norman Bates — the character whom Perkins’s own father, Anthony Perkins, portrayed in 1960 in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” Deep!)
The other thread, perhaps the most universal theme imaginable, is this: Everybody dies. Death is random. Whatever “Final Destination” (or the recent TV show “Laid,” for that matter) might suggest, Death isn’t trying to find you, or punish you for something. Neither can you will death to strike someone, absent the decision to off them yourself. Death just sort of happens; it’s absurd, and the absurdity makes it funny. “Nothing matters,” Lois tells the boys at a relative’s graveside, “or else everything matters.”
