Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The last film by horror specialist Osgood Perkins was Longlegs, in which a homicidal Satan-worshipping doll maker targeted families with daughters born on the 14th of the month. By comparison, his follow-up The Monkey opts for no-frills realism: it is about a toy monkey that causes hideous deaths. One biff on the snare drum from this grinning primate, and hapless innocents fall prey to harpoons, hornets, household implements . . . Bizarrely, the creature’s signature tune is a wheezing rendition of “Oh I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside”, although the action is landlocked in a comically glum version of backwoods America.Based on a Stephen King story, the film is played strictly for charnel-house laughs. It begins with the childhood of twin brothers, mild Hal and bully Bill, both expertly played by Christian Convery. Finding the monkey in a cupboard, they turn its key and watch in horror as the carnage begins. Then, after a deceptive 25-year lull, the mayhem returns on an even more deranged level.In theory, there are only so many times that you can recoil in an ouch-that’s-gotta-hurt fashion — yet Perkins keeps the queasy comedy coming with malign ingenuity. Peopled by vaguely Coen brothers-style grotesques (including one played by Elijah Wood), the film sets up most of its characters as expendable puppets. But Theo James gives his best shot to the Cain-and-Abel dynamic of the brothers as differently traumatised adults, even if he can’t quite overcome a certain square-jawed blandness. The best performance is the most deadpan — Colin O’Brien, exuding bored disbelief as Hal’s estranged son.Some killings are simple, others play out in elaborately contrived chains of cause and effect, in Heath Robinson and Rube Goldberg fashion. Yes, it is all a little mechanical — what would you expect from a film about a wind-up monkey?★★★☆☆In cinemas now
