At the first of what will be many funerals that appear in The Monkey, a young priest struggles to find the right words. After offering some half-hearted bromides about how everything happens for a reason, the priest can no longer pretend that there’s some divine plan behind the death that brought them together — an accident involving a hibachi chef’s knife getting too close to a diner.
“It is what it is,” the priest (Nicco Del Rio) finally declares, with the most conviction he can muster. “The words of the Lord.”
It’s hard to fault the priest for being so lost for words. The usual platitudes about God’s perfect plan and everything working for good fall short when faced with the absurdity of a teenager killed in an accident. That sense of hopelessness increases when we realize that the real impetus behind the teen’s death, and scores of other deaths that occur in the movie, is a toy monkey, who somehow causes mayhem every time it strikes a drum.
Written and directed by Osgood Perkins, The Monkey retains the central concept of the Stephen King short story, in which a nervous man projects his fear of death onto a toy monkey that may or may not have devious powers. However, Perkins takes a wildly irreverent approach, splitting the main character into twins and filling the story with wacky, gross-out humor. In the face of such over-the-top violence, traumatized man Hal and his twin brother, Bill, (both played by Theo James) come up with a variety of coping mechanisms.
For Hal, the best defense is banal asceticism. After an extended first act that shows how Hal and Bill (portrayed by Christian Convery as children) first encounter the monkey and discover its terrible power, we meet adult Hal living a hermetic life. He keeps to himself, making few connections with anyone at his retail job, losing contact with Bill and his Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy), and only seeing his son, Petey, (Colin O’Brien) once a year. For Hal, isolation is the only way he can keep people safe from the death that surrounds him.
Obviously, young Petey doesn’t feel the same way. So when Aunt Ida comes to a grisly end, Petey uses the news that his new stepfather (Elijah Wood) plans to adopt him to force Hal to take him on a trip to settle the late woman’s affairs.
James gives a sober, almost muted performance as Hal, which contrasts with the rest of the movie’s outrageous tone. He keeps straight-faced as the people die around him. When an improbable accident results in a bubbly realtor being shot, exploding like a water balloon filled with blood, Hal freezes. He calmly removes his glasses to wipe them off, barely acknowledging the splatter covering him and the room. He’s seen worse.
More than a mere comedic bit, Hal’s attempted stoicism underscores the movie’s central thesis. As Hal and Bill’s mother tells the boys after their babysitter’s funeral, “Everyone dies. And that’s f-----d up.” She goes on to add more detail: their friends’ babysitters will also die. Their friends will die. Even she will meet her demise, and they will too. Death is inevitable, monkey-motivated or otherwise.
So when Hal separates himself and tries to avoid entanglements, he’s committing an act of faith. He’s trying to assert some sense of control over a world that feels random. But at best, his faith looks impotent in the face of the Rube Goldberg death sequences that fill the film. At its worst, it looks laughable. We can run from the violence that scares us — turn off the news, move to a gated neighborhood, hide inside our homes — but the violence persists.
The same can be said of Bill’s more active, certain faith. He’s confident other people will suffer instead of him. Anyone who holds the monkey, he believes, cannot die. Deep within the house he has transformed into a fortress, Bill has set up an altar to the monkey. He offers praise to it, thanking it for the safety it provides and for the vengeance it can render. Bill worships the power of the monkey, certain that it will punish the people he hates. He begs the monkey to smite his enemies and doesn’t seem dissuaded by the fact that everyone besides his target seems to die. He just continues to stare into the monkey’s frozen grin and continue his worship, unconcerned about the devastation wrought around him.
That last bit should make Christian viewers uncomfortable. It’s impossible to flip through the news and not see someone abusing others in the name of God, declaring their faith as a justification for the harm they cause. It could be as large as President Donald Trump cutting social services that aid the most vulnerable in society while also setting up a task force to hunt out “anti-Christian bias” or it could be as small as a baker refusing to make a cake for a gay couple. Time and again, Christians have treated expressions of faith as cause to abuse and oppress.
On the one hand, Christians can relate to Hal and Bill’s desires. Christianity calls for a form of separation from the world and it tells us that we need not give into fear. But neither separation nor safety are intended to be the center of our faith.
Rather, as 2 Timothy reminds us, “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” In other words, God has equipped us to move past our fear and into doing the work of Christ. That work is made clear throughout the gospels and crystalized in Matthew 11, when a distraught and doubting John the Baptist asked if Jesus was “the one who is to come.” Jesus could have simply said, “Yes,” but instead, he identified himself by listing the actions he was taking on behalf of those in pain: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: ‘the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.’”
Neither Hal’s separate faith nor Bill’s fearless faith heal the blind or the lame. Neither raises the dead. Quite the opposite. Their faiths leave behind a pile of bodies mutilated with cartoonish glee.
Despite its occasional supernatural nods, including the surprising appearance of a figure straight from the Bible (no spoilers here), The Monkey isn’t interested in showing anyone how to live. It’s more interested in pitch- black comedy and gross- out gags. And yet, even in that laughter, we’re shown a sign of a better faith — the ability to find joy and humor in the face of inexplicable death.
That position is articulated by Hal and Bill’s mom, right after she finishes her speech about how death comes for everyone. “Everyone dies. That’s f-----d up,” she repeats. “Now let’s go dancing.” And they do.
That last bit could comfort Christians, at least a little, because that’s the gift we have. Our faith doesn’t exempt us from suffering, nor does it promise that our suffering will have meaning. But it does promise that we’ll have joy and peace, which allows us to love one another in the face of death. We can laugh and connect and love without fear. We can go dancing.
Joe George is a pop-culture writer whose work has appeared at Think Christian, Polygon, The Progressive, and elsewhere. He tweets from @jageorgeiii and collects his work at joewriteswords.com.
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