Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey is a wildly inventive, black-comedy horror ride that takes Stephen King’s 1980 short story and spins it into a gory, Rube Goldberg-style spectacle. The premise is deceptively simple: a cursed toy monkey that kills every time its cymbals clang. What results is a whirlwind of cartoonish yet disturbingly brutal death scenes, making this one of the year’s boldest and bloodiest horror films. It’s a film that embraces its heritage as a King adaptation but doesn’t shy away from making its own mark, merging pitch‑black humor, inventive kills, and a profound sense that death is as inevitable as gravity. The story unfolds across two timelines. In rural Maine in 1999, young twins Hal and Bill Shelburn (both played by Christian Convery) stumble upon the old toy monkey in their attic and quickly learn that its music triggers a spree of horrific “accidents” — one of which claims their mother, played with conviction by Tatiana Maslany. The accident is a harrowing scene, one...