Feature movie review: THE MONKEY 

• Neon Films
• The Monkey

It's one of the more publicized parts of filmmaker Osgood Perkins' biography that he's the son of legendary Psycho actor Anthony Perkins, which made it easy to talk about his connection to a serial-killer thriller like last year's Longlegs. There is, however, a less-well-known part of his history involving his mother, model Berry Berenson: She was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11, which hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. And if you're wondering how an artist might introduce such an experience into their work, I submit to you as one possible example Perkins' The Monkey.

In theory, The Monkey is an adaptation of the 1980 short story of the same name by Stephen King, but it retains only the most rudimentary plot similarity of a character trying to escape the legacy of a monkey toy that seems to cause a death every time it plays its music. Part of that thematic idea, in the sense of death being chaotic and inexplicable, feels profoundly connected to someone processing the loss of his mother in a seemingly unimaginable way. Yet this version of The Monkey takes it a bit farther, by including the notion of how futile it is try to make death seem controllable. And along the way, he makes the audience response to death part of a surprisingly goofy entertainment.

The tale is narrated by Hal Shelburn (Theo James), as he reaches back into his past to examine the legacy of his absentee father (an uncredited Adam Scott) on him and his twin brother, Bill (both played as middle-schoolers by Christian Convery), as well as their mother Lois (Tatiana Maslany), particularly related to the aforementioned, apparently-cursed wind-up monkey that was among dad's possessions. Twenty-five years later, Hal is dealing with his own messy relationship with his son, Petey (Colin O'Brien), when it seems that the monkey has returned to play more fatal music.

The resulting deaths are almost uniformly played as broad comedy—even the eulogies by a fumbling, ineffectual minister are hilarious stuff—marking a radical tonal shift from the dread-soaked Longlegs. There's more than a touch of Final Destination to the Rube Goldberg-esque processes by which people meet their demise, allowing the build-up towards the inevitable catastrophe to become part of the fun. Perkins also intentionally shoots the death sequences with an emphasis on the kind of over-the-top gore that wouldn't feel out of place in Monty Python, as bodies explode in showers of blood and viscera, more likely to inspire yelps of laughter than screams of fright.

The horror genre definitely has had a long history of employing gallows humor with the grislier moments, but the way Perkins leans into that mix in The Monkey feels like it shows a real understanding of how those two ideas intersect. There's a running reference to the fact that Hal's planned father-son outing with Petey involves going to an amusement park, one of those places where rollercoasters combine the thrilling sense of cheating death with shrieks of glee. While this film certainly is attempting something that nods to the long history of Stephen King adaptations—from the "kids grappling with primal fear" stuff to the Stand By Me-style narration to naming one character "Annie Wilkes"—Perkins is also exploring something personal in confronting capricious tragedy not with bitterness, but with a recognition of its inherent absurdity.

It's kind of a bummer that The Monkey gets sidetracked from its mommy issues to focus a lot of its time on daddy issues; a whole lot of the character dynamics here are predicated on people feeling abandoned by their fathers. That's a perfectly valid subject for exploration, but it ultimately feels like a distraction in a story that's so much more interesting when it's about how we deal with loss of a more concrete kind. Yes, death comes to us all, and sometimes it comes in ways that seem to defy all sense of justice and normalcy. Here's a thriller that recognizes one of the best ways to handle the randomness inherent in that manifestation of Death is to laugh in its face.