In Review: 'The Monkey,' 'The Gorge'

A pair of new genre films offer threats both small and large with mixed results.

The Monkey
Dir. Osgood Perkins
98 min.

It would be a mistake to call the drum-playing wind-up monkey a toy, airline pilot Petey Shelburn (Adam Scott) tells the pawn shop owner upon whom he’s trying to unload the item in the opening scene of The Monkey. Sure, it looks like a plaything, but the monkey has a pretty serious quirk: when wound up, it bangs its little drums like a plaything, but once it’s done, someone dies. What’s more, their deaths are spectacular, odds-defying, and really gross. So maybe a better word for the monkey would be a “device.” That’s certainly the role it plays in The Monkey, and not always in ways that help the film. An adaptation of Stephen King’s 1980 short story of the same name, Osgood Perkins’ follow-up to last year’s unsettling Longlegs often plays like a piece of machinery itself, one that turns and turns until reaching a moment where the monkey can do its thing. Then it resumes turning again.

There’s something missing at the heart of Perkins’ film, though it’s not a central thesis. When Petey’s twin sons Hal and Bill (played as boys by Christian Convery and as adults by Theo James) discover the monkey in the back of their long-absent father’s closet, it comes in a box labeled “Like Life.” (Not, as Bill, the mean twin to his brother’s more sensitive model, notes, “Lifelike.”) Time and again, the film returns to the idea that death is random and can arrive at any moment, even when there’s no wind-up monkey involved (but especially when there is). It’s a strong idea, yet Perkins’ attempts to use dark humor to get the point across scores diminishing returns.

That neither Hal nor Bill emerge as distinctive characters doesn’t help. Both are scarred by the monkey-enabled deaths that defined their childhood, but they’ve followed different paths in adulthood. Bill has become a recluse. Hal has become a grocery store clerk who’s distanced himself from his teenage son, also named Petey (Colin O’Brien). Hal attempts to repair their relationship but when the monkey resurfaces, that attempt takes a detour. What follows are a string of creatively staged, unfailingly macabre, but only occasionally amusing misadventures that put plenty of dry humor and wet gore on the screen but struggle to feel compelling in any meaningful way. Once the film has shown its hand with one or two elaborate kills, it just starts repeating itself. That’s also kind of like life, I guess, but aren’t movies supposed to find meaning in such parallels? —Keith Phipps

The Monkey is now in theaters (and maybe hiding in your closet?)

The Gorge
Dir. Scott Derrickson
127 min.

Generally when you’re asked to watch a gorge, it’s an easy job. Not so in The Gorge, in which watching a gorge is quite difficult indeed. In fact, it doesn’t make any sense for only two people to manage such an immense crevasse, given what lurks underneath the thick shroud of fog that blankets the surface. Then again, nothing in The Gorge makes much sense.  

Anya Taylor-Joy does her best to elevate the material as Drasa, a Lithuanian sniper recruited for a year-long special assignment. At a secret location deep in a mountain range, Drasa and her American counterpart Levi (Miles Teller), an ex-Marine turned private contractor, occupy towers at opposite sides of a gorge and they’re not given much information about what to expect. The Brit that Levi is relieving for a year-long term describes the job as “maintenance” of a system to keep whatever terrible things are inside the gorge from getting out. That means Levi and Drasa have to make sure the defenses around their towers are monitored and stocked, but they also discover that they have to be prepared to shoot whatever creepy-crawlies manage to get through. They’re also forbidden from making contact, which makes no sense tactically—but again, nothing in The Gorge makes much sense. 

Before things get too hairy, however, Drasa and Levi start flirting from afar, slaking their loneliness through cute messages and sharpshooting gamesmanship, both looking at ease communicating from the other side of a scope. This stretch of The Gorge, before much of anything happens action-wise, is the most appealing, buoyed by a relaxed chemistry between the two stars and a few choice needle drops from bands like the Ramones and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. As it happens, the two have the means to bridge the gap that separates the towers, but when chaos erupts at an inopportune moment, they have to face their gnarly adversaries—referred to as “Hollow Men,” in reference to a T.S. Eliot poem—and learn some disturbing secrets about what’s really going on. 

It is fortunate for screenwriter Zach Dean that much of what follows is shrouded in the fog of “spoiler alert,” because the truth about the gorge is immensely stupid and nonsensical. Director Scott Derrickson—best known for Sinister, Doctor Strange, and a lot of very bad tweets—is a solid stylist, and The Gorge is the sort of slick genre schlock that would play well in theaters and drive-ins, rather than the purgatory of Apple TV+. But the film feels like an adaptation of a video game that doesn’t exist, with short bursts of action followed by cutscenes that dole out evidence of a decades-long conspiracy. (Sigourney Weaver’s casting as Levi’s employer turns out to be a big wink to an Aliens plot point.) Specifically, the film mimics the lab-experiment-gone-wrong formula of Resident Evil, with Taylor-Joy slotting perfectly into the Milla Jovovich role. But The Gorge feels like a generic creature that’s emerged from a genre festival like Fantastic Fest or Fantasia, and it’s reasonable to keep up your defenses. — Scott Tobias

The Gorge is streaming exclusively on Apple TV+, along with other films that will never be heard from again.