Osgood Perkins’s 2024 sleeper hit horror Longlegs needed Nicolas Cage to work. It needed his jittery unpredictability, that manic look in the actor’s eye, that feeling that he’d taken the wheel of our car and left us unsure whether we were headed home or straight into a ditch. Perkins’s follow-up, The Monkey, revolves around a pair of twins cursed by a mechanical monkey that’s really a harbinger of death – every time it goes tap, tap, tap on its tin drum, somebody dies. It’s a diabolically fun premise, but it needed somebody Cage-ier to sell it.
Perkins has expanded a short story by Stephen King, and The White Lotus’s Theo James – playing the roles of both Hal and Bill Shelburn – has a good handle on the author’s charmingly peculiar tempo. King’s narrators always sound like they’ve hustled up to you in the last, dead hours of a city bar, with a can of beer in hand and a tale of woe on their lips. James captures that drawled morbidity.
