Hot off the success of last year’s Longlegs, writer-director Oz Perkins is back with another horror movie that’s sure to be popular with genre fans. The Monkey is based on the Stephen King story about a cursed toy that seems to be the cause of a series of deaths, many of them seemingly comparable to the clever kills in the Final Destination franchise. According to the first reviews of the adaptation, it’s a very funny and extremely gory movie with an impressive dual performance from Theo James playing twin brothers.
Here’s what critics are saying about The Monkey:
It’s his best film yet and, hopefully, a sign of things to come from this talented storyteller.
— Dan Bayer, Next Best Picture
Over his past couple of features, Perkins has been moving away from the vibes-based storytelling of his early work and into more accessible fare. The Monkey marks a new step in that evolution.
— Katie Rife, AV Club
If you’re a fan of Oz Perkins’s previous horror movies, you might expect a bleak and depressing picture… Perhaps the biggest surprise of The Monkey is that it sees Perkins operating in a totally new and unique mode within his signature filmmaking style.
— Bill Bria, Discussing Film
After the director’s more somber works, it’s fun to see him step into splatterpunk territory. There’s an argument to be made that he should’ve been here the whole time.
— Amy West, Total Film
Perkins has always been a formally confident filmmaker but The Monkey contains some of his most striking imagery.
— Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com
The Monkey really does feel like Longlegs with a dash of James Wan in it. It’s definitely more glossy and crowd-pleasing than Perkins’s last movie.
— Emma Kiely, Collider
There’s no denying that The Monkey is very Stephen King through-and-through, and possibly one of the goriest adaptations of his work at that.
— Edward Douglas, The Weekend Warrior
Perkins honors King’s work by keeping the humor and the carnage shoulder to shoulder for the entirety of The Monkey’s ripping 98 minutes.
— Tom Jorgensen, IGN Movies
The Monkey is hardly your average King page-to-screen situation — a relief, considering how many of those are already out there.
— Cheryl Eddy, io9.com
Stephen King adaptations have existed in wide variety of forms and genres, and I have personally seen them all. That being said, never before have we seen something like Osgood Perkins’s The Monkey.
— Eric Eisenberg, CinemaBlend
Perkins takes considerable creative liberties in adapting Stephen King’s 1980 short story. However, all of these changes remain true to the spirit of King’s work.
— Bill Bria, Discussing Film
By injecting an infectious layer of fun into the morbid goings-on, [Perkins is] able to engage the spirit of King’s typical dialogue without being slavish to it.
— J Hurtado, ScreenAnarchy
Given that the story is inspired by a King creation, I was expecting the brothers to come together to best the beast, but there’s none of that heartwarming bravery here – and it’s kind of refreshing.
— Amy West, Total Film
Did Oz Perkins direct the most brutal, unflinching, and spectacularly gory horror movie of 2025? It’s possible.
— Matt Donato, Daily Dead
The Monkey abandons subtlety and seriousness in favor of gonzo and gory displays of ultra-violent death.
— Kristy Puchko, Mashable
Perkins goes whole hog, staging some of the greatest splatter I’ve seen in a mainstream horror film in years.
— J Hurtado, ScreenAnarchy
Perkins is unrelenting in his gore while still ensuring there’s a consistent, nestling atmosphere of dread that he always executes exceptionally.
— Emma Kiely, Collider
There’s a lot of Looney Tunes carnage in The Monkey, all of it revealed in shocking little bursts…The gore is explicit, but the film is never scary. And it’s not trying to be.
— Katie Rife, AV Club
Audiences tuned into its disturbing/gross frequency are going to have a ball.
— Eric Eisenberg, CinemaBlend
Much has been made of The Monkey‘s gore and it certainly doesn’t disappoint – that said, once you’ve seen one person exploding into chunks, the others that follow don’t pack so much of a punch.
— Amy West, Total Film
Perkins crafts some of the bloodiest, nastiest kills of the year, and it’s only February! The kills in The Monkey are less Rube Goldbergian and more slapstick.
— Bill Bria, Discussing Film
Perkins is having an absolute blast figuring out inventive ways to murder people. One unforgettable death involves an electrified swimming pool; another has an almost cartoonish degree of carnage after a woman’s head lights on fire.
— Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com
Perkins demonstrates an excellent command of tone throughout these gruesome deaths, and they aren’t all punchlines… A few are truly wrenching and effective reminders of the human stakes of the story.
— Tom Jorgensen, IGN Movies
Where plenty of horror filmmakers can unleash gore or deliver kills that are radically ruthless, few can do it with the panache and wit that Perkins shows here.
— Kristy Puchko, Mashable
A great deal of fun comes from the build-up to each murder… The Monkey delivers plenty of creative, shriek-inducing examples.
— Cheryl Eddy, io9.com
The gore-filled kills impress with their creativity, but what makes them memorable is their rhythm… Every single one lands with an exclamation point, eliciting screams and laughter in equal measure.
— Dan Bayer, Next Best Picture
The main comparison for most viewers will be Final Destination, but those films were arguably more hopeful.
— Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com
The Monkey, for the most part, plays like a grittier and more elevated Final Destination movie… but the Perkins-isms throughout make it miles better than any entry in the franchise.
— Emma Kiely, Collider
Comparisons to the Final Destination franchise… aren’t that fair or accurate, as the kills happen so quickly that you’re not given enough time to really appreciate the mastery of Perkins’s special make-up effects team.
— Edward Douglas, The Weekend Warrior
Unlike the similarly-themed Final Destination, it has something profound to say.
— Amy West, Total Film
Stephen King adaptations have existed in wide variety of forms and genres, and I have personally seen them all. That being said, never before have we seen something like Osgood Perkins’s The Monkey… Various pieces of The Monkey feel reminiscent of everything from Final Destination to The Addams Family to Child’s Play, but when combined, it very much becomes its own thing.
— Eric Eisenberg, CinemaBlend
The Monkey best resembles an average episode of Tales From the Crypt, but that’s not to say that it’s just a gorefest lark.
— Bill Bria, Discussing Film
Wickedly funny, with pitch-black humor dialed all the way up.
— Bill Bria, Discussing Film
It might be a horror, but it’s a laugh riot, too.
— Amy West, Total Film
Perkins reveals a deeply morbid sense of humor only hinted at in his previous films, painting the screen red with gleefully executed extreme gore gags aplenty.
— J Hurtado, ScreenAnarchy
Perkins is constantly giving you reasons to laugh.
— Emma Kiely, Collider
Perkins keeps upping the ante on his film’s comedic brand of insanity… It’s almost like death has a sense of humor in this movie.
— Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com
The Monkey is a deadpan horror comedy that earns every laugh it gets with precise comic timing and perfect joke structure.
— Dan Bayer, Next Best Picture
One zippy montage in particular… will make audiences feel that delightful indecision of whether they should guffaw or dry-heave.
— Cheryl Eddy, io9.com
Theo James excels in his dual performances as the milquetoast, overly cautious Hal and his mulleted dickhead twin brother Bill.
— J Hurtado, ScreenAnarchy
James is fantastic in the dual role… It’s quite astonishing how effectively he sets [the twins] apart.
— Amy West, Total Film
Maslany leaves a strong impression in [her] role.
— Tom Jorgensen, IGN Movies
Tatiana Maslany makes Lois, the mother of the twins, a wonderfully no-nonsense “boy mom” whose philosophy on life is both subversively dark and realistic.
— Bill Bria, Discussing Film
It’s a vicious and hysterical spectacle of blood and brain matter that’ll make you laugh, gasp, gag, and even think.
— Kristy Puchko, Mashable
The Monkey is one of the most intriguing horror films in recent memory, mainly because it features no firm set of rules or transgressions that explain when, how, or who dies.
— Bill Bria, Discussing Film
Amid all its carnage, The Monkey also leaves the viewer with deeper themes to ponder… To have a movie with so much outrageous death also be about accepting death as something both mundane and inevitable feels like The Monkey’s most clever achievement.
— Cheryl Eddy, io9.com
There is a little bit of meat on The Monkey, much of it coming from the tension between the human need to understand why bad things happen and the cruel indifference of the universe in general.
— Katie Rife, AV Club
The toy slowly becomes a Jungian shadow, re-emerging and coming to represent a supposed family curse of sh–ty fatherhood. It’s here, during the introduction of this brand-new idea, that the movie is at its most intriguing, and the monkey is most potent as an embodiment of self-perpetuating guilt.
— Siddhant Adlakha, Inverse
The Monkey isn’t afraid to pose existential questions but whenever Perkins senses things getting a little too deep, he confidently breaks away to a decapitated head, a smiling portrait at a funeral, or a red-eyed chuckling chimpanzee and undercuts it.
— Amy West, Total Film
For those who aren’t looking for a 97-minute “dielight” reel, you’ll struggle with The Monkey. It’s not a one-trick pony, but the film’s best trick is so dominant that less appreciative viewers might choose that wording.
— Matt Donato, Daily Dead
The Monkey is at its weakest when it tries too hard to explain what’s happening, either on a plot or on a thematic level. (The narration can be especially detrimental in this way.)
— Katie Rife, AV Club
The titular monkey becomes a massive metaphor for familial trauma and how it can haunt you – a welcome expansion on Stephen King’s short story, but Perkins’s screenplay handles it a little clunkily, bluntly stating the thematic intent in a heavy-handed closing monologue.
— Dan Bayer, Next Best Picture
The film’s ruminations on mortality and remorse are restrained by a tonally haphazard approach, laced with an irony that’s neither funny nor bitter enough to make a lasting impact.
— Siddhant Adlakha, Inverse
90%
The Monkey
(2025)
opens in theaters on February 21, 2025.
