In 2025, there were a lot of dramas, comedies, action flicks, superhero films and romance stories across streaming and theaters.
But if I have to narrow it down to the one 2025 movie that I absolutely loved, then my pick is The Monkey.
This Stephen King adaptation brought a comedic edge to its horror without losing its way.
This movie is more than just a simple horror story, and Watch With Us is sharing the reasons why you should watch The Monkey.
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The Premise Is Deceptively Simple
The Monkey was originally a short story published by King in 1980. The title object is a wind-up drum-playing toy monkey that is cursed with supernatural powers. Every time the monkey plays, someone will die. It seems ridiculous, but the movie demonstrates its power early on in a very convincing way. And the film mines a lot of dramatic and comedic scenes from the Monkey’s power
At no point does the Monkey speak or act as if it’s alive, and yet it seems to have a will of its own. Any attempts to make the Monkey kill a specific person are met with fierce resistance … and it usually claims a victim whose death would emotionally hurt its user the most. There is something diabolical behind this Monkey that’s never explained, and all attempts to destroy it fail. The film embraces the inherent dark comedy of that premise, and yet also finds ways to make it terrifying. Whenever the Monkey is around, gruesome deaths aren’t far behind.
‘The Monkey’ Features Four Great Performances by Two Actors
Theo James and Christian Convery aren’t likely to get recognition for their efforts in The Monkey because of its genre trappings. Yet these two actors are responsible for four outstanding performances in the film as a pair of twins, Hal and Bill Sheldburn. Convery’s scenes dominate the first half of the movie as Bill develops a dominant and bullying persona that makes Hal hate him. The two kids are so believable on-screen that it’s sometimes hard to remember that Convery is playing both of them. Tatiana Maslany is also very good in the flashbacks as their mother, Lois Shelburn.
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For the present-day sequences, James primarily plays Hal as a man who tries to keep people at a distance because he remembers all too well that the Monkey can take them from him at any time. Bill goes in a completely different direction that we won’t spoil here. What we can say is that there’s a true sense of menace and insanity from Bill that’s absent from his brother. Like Convery, James makes them feel like distinct characters.
The Film Balances Horror With Funny and Emotional Scenes
If The Monkey had only focused on being a scary story, it probably wouldn’t have had the same impact. Director Osgood Perkins stages the gruesome deaths in some inventive and hilarious ways that are darkly funny. In real life, no one would laugh at the carnage left in the Monkey’s wake, but the film always seems to find the humor in it. Some characters’ fates are more tragic than others, but even the final deaths in the movie were designed to make the audience howl with laughter.
More impressively, Perkins keeps the focus largely on the two brothers while also introducing Hal’s teenage son, Petey (Colin O’Brien), in the second half of the film. Petey gets a first-hand look at the generational trauma that broke his father and his uncle. All things considered, Petey takes it pretty well. One of the late scenes between Hal and Bill is actually an emotionally moving sequence where they finally feel some empathy for each other. Naturally, Perkins keeps the sequence from being too heartfelt by adding yet moment of black comedy.
‘The Monkey’ Received Critical Praise, But Some People Really Hated It
Horror movies typically don’t receive widespread critical praise, but The Monkey is one of the exceptions. It has a fairly decent 77 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer, with a critical consensus that the movie is equal parts a successful horror and black comedy.
The audience score, measured by RT’s Popcornmeter, however, isn’t so high at 55 percent, which indicates the film’s divisive reception among the general populace. Fandango users left some pretty scathing comments, with one moviegoer lamenting that watching The Monkey was a “waste of money and time! Should’ve paid me to watch! And I still should’ve walked out!” Ouch.
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I obviously disagree, but I understand why people have a negative reaction to it. The Monkey isn’t your standard horror film — it uses humor as a weapon, not as a way of satirizing horror movie tropes as Scream does, or to relieve tension like most horror-comedies do. As a result, The Monkey is truly unsettling, and a 2025 movie I love and still think about in 2026.
The Monkey is streaming on Hulu.
