On Blu-ray, 'The Monkey' is the Funniest Movie of 2025 title_ext

From the director of Longlegs comes a horror movie wholly unlike Longlegs. The Monkey is a gloriously funny and depraved piece of entertainment that will have you laughing hysterically—if you vibe with its penchant for ridiculously bloody kills and streaks of dark humor.

There is a bit of a plot, but to be honest, I could watch another hour of the insidiously evil “toy” dispatching nameless characters in macabre ways without another ounce of story added. 

The Final Destination franchise may have Rube Goldberg-sequel deaths down to a methodical science, but The Monkey makes those films look quaint in comparison. Clever, sadistically hilarious, and timelessly memorable, The Monkey delivers not one but several of the best horror kills you’ll see all year. If not this decade. 

Theo James is great as the lead; he clearly gets what director Osgood Perkins is selling and aligns to the material accordingly, delivering a mischievously straight yet disturbed performance as a man who has been traumatized by the monkey’s antics since he was a child (he also plays his much more traumatized identical twin). The rest of the cast falls in line too, at least for as long as their characters remain alive. 

The Monkey loses some steam in the third act as Perkins shifts into plot mode to justify his menagerie of ruthless “dispatchings.” There are less deaths, more machinations, and a march to a conclusion I wish would never come.

But the journey is worth a less illustrious send-off. As good as Longlegs was at establishing atmosphere (it too stumbles in the third act, arguably to more detrimental effect), The Monkey succeeds at setting an absurdist tone that is simultaneously dark and hilarious. It is body horror to the extreme, and The Monkey should be celebrated for its excesses. 

Review by Erik Samdahl.

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