The Monkey review: Osgood Perkins’s follow-up to Longlegs needed Nicolas Cage instead of Theo James

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey Get our The Life Cinematic email for free Get our The Life Cinematic email for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy Osgood Perkins’s 2024 sleeper hit horror Longlegs needed Nicolas Cage to work. 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. Theo James in Osgood Perkins’s ‘The Monkey’ Yet Hal and Bill, as the focus of events and two distinct inheritors of generational trauma, don’t quite fit in. Bill isn’t as eccentric as the plot tells us he should be, while Hal, the more passive of the two, should still read as a frayed-nerve loner likely to yell the phrase, “We gotta make like eggs and scramble!” That doesn’t mean The Monkey necessarily needed Cage.