Review: Trauma haunts ‘The Monkey,’ but the film is more interested in going bananas

Can a horror movie itself suffer from nervous fright? That’s the only explanation for the numbing lack of thrills or chills or dread in Osgood Perkins’ “The Monkey.” Given its overabundance of empty shock humor, the movie seems afraid to be about much of anything except its toy monkey’s prankish body count.

Maybe it’s a case of demonic-doll fatigue for Perkins, coming off the smash success of “Longlegs,” last year’s highest-grossing independent film, and a suitably unnerving tour of the mental and physical wreckage a scary gift leaves behind. The source material this time around is a fantastic 1980 Stephen King story (republished in his 1985 collection “Skeleton Crew”) about the power a mysterious cymbal-banging toy simian has on the mind of a boy surrounded by death and later when he’s an adult ridden with an eerie guilt. Is it the monkey’s doing? Are the fears of childhood little more than a clanging we try our whole lives to suppress?

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There’s enough there for any decent horror filmmaker to tease out, especially a director with the eye for detail and mood that gave “Longlegs” its aura of hidden abnormality and a timeless evil lying in wait. So why does Perkins avoid what’s so inherently human in “The Monkey” and go for the distancing effect of cartoonish characters and Looney Tunes carnage?

The prologue, set in a pawn shop and featuring a blood-stained Adam Scott doing his best to warn the proprietor against stocking the title plaything, is little more than an SNL short with a visceral punchline. The problem is that by starting from a place of snark, the movie ensures we’ll never see the monkey as anything but a novelty gag, the dropping of its drumstick hand a gore lover’s dopamine fix. (Yes, it’s been given a percussion makeover from the short story’s cymbal-ism.) The decision to give the thing some bared teeth and occasionally film it from a variety of doom-laden angles ultimately feel like desperation moves when really, they should have just given it a freaky Nicolas Cage voice and let it be full-on ominous.

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The story, as changed by Perkins, is that the bug-eyed monkey, which comes in a box marked “Like life,” is the discovery of identical twin boys Hal and Bill (both played by Christian Convery) who live with their single mom (Tatiana Maslany). After some gruesome deaths gut their lives, Hal chops up the cursed toy and the brothers grow up estranged. Cut to “White Lotus” actor Theo James as Hal years later: a man fearful of being close to anyone — even his own son, Petey (Colin O’Brien) — but drawn back to the notion that the monkey, having inexplicably reemerged intact, is on another killing spree in the small Maine town he left behind. What really worries Hal, though, is that his brother Bill is somehow involved.

If that sounds sufficiently thick with psychological dread about family bonds and trauma, too bad: “The Monkey” is a forced, kitschy deadpan comedy about how we all have it coming, with nothing to mark our passing but gray matter and splatter. James, who narrates the childhood portion, is a confused-looking presence onscreen, as if unsure about what kind of movie he’s in. But it’s never enough to make us care or laugh. As with the underused Maslany and, in a painfully unfunny scene, Elijah Wood (playing Petey’s stepdad-to-be), James is no more representative of a human being than the brightly colored, windup prop of death haunting his existence.

As per usual, this oft-adapted author deserves better. A truly insidious horror film might have found a way to use bloody humor as a nervous grace note to offset what’s tangibly distressing about our gnawing powerlessness. But sometimes, movies like “The Monkey” can only see fit to goof around with toys.