The Monkey is a 2025 black horror-comedy written and directed by Osgood Perkins, fresh off the success of Longlegs, based on a Stephen King short story and produced by James Wan for Neon. It stars Theo James as both adult twins, Hal and Bill Shelburn, alongside Tatiana Maslany and Elijah Wood. I came into it off the back of a genuinely strong run of films, and I suspect that streak is exactly why the universe decided to hand me this as a corrective. It did not land for me on any level.

Let me lay out the premise, because it is the whole film. There is a cursed wind-up toy monkey. You turn its key, it bangs a small drum, and somebody, somewhere, dies in a grisly, random, cartoonishly over-the-top fashion. That is the engine of the entire movie. As a small but telling detail, the monkey bangs a drum rather than clashing cymbals, as it does in the source material, purely because the production could not secure the rights to the classic cymbal-monkey design. So the cursed instrument of doom is a drum by legal accident, which is somehow the most interesting fact about the whole production.

Nearly every review will compare this to Final Destination, and that comparison is completely fair, because the two share a premise of elaborate, inventive, unavoidable death. The problem is that The Monkey is a worse version of every Final Destination film ever made, and the reason comes down to one word: suspense. The Final Destination films understood that the horror lives in the anticipation. They would show you the frayed cable, the loose wheel, the slick of oil on the floor, and then make you sit in agonised dread as the pieces slowly assembled into a kill. The Monkey has no interest in any of that. It simply has the toy raise its little arm as though it is about to drop the beat of the century, and then a death happens, abruptly and without build. The film treats this randomness as the point, a nihilistic shrug about how death comes for everyone without reason. I understand the intent. I just found it completely inert. Take away the tension and all you are left with is gore for its own sake, and gore alone gets old very quickly.

Then there is Theo James, and I say this as someone who thinks he is a genuinely charismatic, extremely handsome leading man. He cannot sustain an American accent. It wobbles, drifts, and vanishes for whole scenes before returning slightly altered, and because the film casts him as identical twins, I got to hear the accent falter twice as often across two different characters. When a performance leans this heavily on a single actor doing double duty, the accent slipping becomes impossible to ignore, and it pulled me out of the film again and again.