"Everybody dies..."
Having plumbed the disturbing depths of familial dysfunction and generational trauma for the unsettling and effective horror-thriller Longlegs, writer-director Osgood Perkins returns to those very same dark and fertile depths for a good, morbid, and cathartic laugh at the cruel absurdities of life with The Monkey.
Although Perkins takes a great deal of narrative liberties with this ostensible adaptation of Stephen King's short story of the same name, the basic conceit and framework of both are, by and large, the same. A young boy discovers that a toy monkey can and will kill whenever it starts whaling away at its cymbals (in the original story) or its drum (in the movie). Beyond that...
King played it straight with his story, managing to invoke both horror and dread via the nightmarish absurdity of a killer toy monkey somehow being both real and very dangerous. It also seemed to be both sentient and incredibly vindictive. That is how I remember it, at least.
But what might work as words on a page meant to be translated and played out in the reader's theater of the mind, might not work all that well when dramatized for the screen. So Perkins leans into the absurdity and inherent silliness of the concept and the carnage. There were several hilarious and gruesome over-the-top kills in the movie that had both myself and the audience around me howling and cackling.
Yet, even as all that carnage played out, I also noticed how Perkins did not shy away from how traumatic these events were for his protagonist(s). There were quite a few moments when the movie not only acknowledged this trauma, it also weaved it into the narrative tapestry, allowing for some interesting and challenging character development.
The result is a movie that is both laugh out loud funny and also a somber meditation on the longterm effects that grief, trauma, abuse, and neglect can have on a person. Which makes The Monkey a thematically potent gem of a horror-comedy. Maybe even a classic...
No comments:
Post a Comment