Tag: The Monkey

Keeper (2025) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: Terrifying visions plague a free-spirited artist when she travels to a secluded cabin with the doctor she’s been dating for one year.

I went into this surprisingly blind for someone who has seen the trailer at least 11 times at the local cinema. It gave nothing away. So I expected it to be mysterious and creepy. Turns out it didn’t give anything away because there’s not that much to give away, at least not until the ending. It’s not a sequential escalation of events; it’s just stuff happens, then similar stuff happens, with no explanation.

Imagine you go to a restaurant expecting chocolate cake. It’s a 60-minute time limit, but for 50 minutes, all you have access to is bread. You’re confused, trying to figure out what is going on, wondering if you’re even going to get any cake. Then, just when you’ve given up hope, the cake arrives, and it is good; it somehow explains the bread. In that scenario, are you going to tell people “the cake was really good”, or are you going to talk about how you spent most of the time eating bread? That’s my experience with this movie (the bread is nonsensical weirdness, the cake is logic and storytelling, obviously). Most of the 99-minute runtime is spent with incomprehensible weirdness instead of scares. I have similar issues with it that I had with Osgood’s 2024 movie Longlegs; it looks pretty, the performances are good, but nothing happens, and then it continues to happen. It’s demonstrably dull. Part of that is the weirdness; it overplays the “something spooky, but it was possibly a dream” moments, so nothing lands. Every time you see something, you’re never sure if it’s real, so you assume it’s not, which means nothing has meaning.

The performances are great, that has to be said. By which I mean, of the three characters we spend the most time with, one is spectacular, and is luckily the one who is onscreen most of the time. On the downside, I have recently watched Broad City, so it did take a while to move past Tatiana Maslany’s resemblance to Ilana Glazer. If it wasn’t for Maslany, I’d have HATED this movie. Her performance is incredible, which is handy as most of the time she doesn’t really have anyone to bounce off.

Perkins has injected the film with an atmosphere that’s very low-key, incredibly naturalistic. Which makes it all the more disappointing when he keeps going back to hackneyed horror tropes when we see the creatures/visions. Those visions don’t seem to increase in levels; they stay consistent throughout, so they seem more repetitive than my complaints about them.

To be honest, this is a difficult review to write as it’s difficult to resist the urge not to just repeat a lot of the sentences from the Die My Love review, maybe mixed in with my Longlegs review too. There’s a filmmaking rule: Show, Don’t Tell. Essentially, if you want to tell the audience that a character is in pain, it’s best to do that by having them wince when they move, etc, rather than have them come in and say “I am in pain”. Films like Keeper take that advice too literally, showing us random things with no explanation. Short flashbacks and spooky shit do not count as foreshadowing; it’s just annoying.

In summary, I think it’s a style issue. I just don’t like Perkins’ style as a filmmaker. Except for The Monkey, I loved that. If this were a short, I’d have loved it. But because it spent sooooo long getting to the f*cking point, I was too bored to care by the time it got interesting.

The Monkey (2025) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: Hal and his son Petey spend a final weekend together before Hal signs away parental rights. A weekend that’s spoiled somewhat by a toy monkey that causes brutal deaths, seemingly targeting Hals family.

Two weeks. That’s the difference between me loving this movie, and me just really liking it. The reason for this? Two weeks before watching The Monkey, I saw the trailer for Final Destination: Bloodlines. As such, when I watched The Monkey, all I could think of was Final Destination. That is unfair to this movie, I know, but I felt I had to mention it.

Aside from that? This is fun. It’s not really a horror movie. Yes, it’s bloody and violent, but it’s not that scary. There are not that many moments where you’re on the edge of your seat with how tense it is, or where you’re concerned for characters and want to see them survive. If anything, you’re intrigued. You look around the room, curious as to how deaths will occur. The deaths aren’t particularly harrowing. They are VERY bloody, and some will make you jump because of how sudden they are, but they won’t stick with you. You won’t be haunted by any of the violence in The Monkey, you may laugh.

None of that is meant as a criticism, by the way. Just establishing the tone so that nobody will go in expecting something different from what they get. The Monkey should not be a serious horror movie, it should be stupid. Remember Night Swim from last year? If so, you may be entitled to compensation. Night Swim (as reviewed here) was a ridiculous concept that tried to play it seriously and suffered for it. It should have done what The Monkey did. The Monkey is well aware of how ridiculous it is and never pretends to be anything else. That’s why it’s worthwhile. It is always entertaining. Part of that is due to the directing, Osgood Perkins knows the beats to hit both in terms of narrative and directing. The performances work too. Theo James has come a long way from having shit on his nose in The Inbetweeners Movie. He has a duel rule there as both brothers. He does a pretty good job of playing the two characters as different people, but a lot of that is due to the wardrobe design too, but James does carry both of them differently enough for audiences to never be confused.

The other performers are great too. Elijah Wood is such a dick. It would have been nice to have him in it more, but I can’t think of a natural way for the film to have that happen, so I’m okay with it. The only other performer who is given enough time is Colin O’Brien, who spends so much time with his character being sullen and uncooperative that it’s difficult to actually judge his performance fairly.

I will admit, I was not a fan of the ending. Not the lead-up to the ending, or even the final moment. But there’s a symbolic moment in the closing scene which didn’t really work for me. It felt like it was symbolism for the sake of symbolism, just to show how smart the writers are. Shame, as the rest of the film is tightly written, closing up narrative loopholes you think you’ve spotted. The characters all have clear motivations, so even when they do stupid things, it makes sense. There’s a moment at the start (the inciting incident in fact) that feels a bit sudden, two one-minute scenes building up to it would have helped sell that moment a lot better because at the moment it makes a character’s reaction seem a bit extreme.

In summary; not perfect, not essential, but extremely entertaining. I’ve sold how silly and fun it is, but when it gets serious it works too, especially when it touches on family dynamics. That’s to be expected with Osgood’s family history. Osgood’s father was Anthony Perkins, who spent a lot of his life closeted (in terms of public appearance anyway) and married to someone who tried to keep his homosexual nature a secret from his own sons. And his mother? Died in the 9/11 attacks. So it makes sense that someone like him would be effective at crossing over the line between grief and violence, especially when it comes to family relationships. With that in mind, there are parts of The Monkey that do feel like therapy, but in a good way. This is Perkins doing what only he can. He utilises his personal experience and cloaks it in a way that he can sell to a mass audience. His next step is Keeper later in the year, which looks like a more serious prospect than The Monkey, but I’m interested in seeing it.