Film Reviews: The Monkey doesn't exactly burden itself with concern for story or characters
The Monkey.
- The Monkey
- ★★★☆☆
- In cinemas
Some horror films go to extraordinary lengths to explain, or at least contextualise, their supernatural elements.
And then there are films like The Monkey (15A), which simply states that we’re dealing with ‘a bad magic killer monkey’ and swiftly moves on to doling out a variety of gory deaths.
Adapted from a Stephen King short story, the film opens with a blood-soaked airline pilot attempting to get rid of a toy monkey in a pawn shop, only to die in the ensuring carnage.
Enter Hal and Bill (teenage twin brothers, both played by Christian Convery), who discover the monkey stashed in the back of a basement cupboard.
Hal is horrified by the carnage wrought by the monkey once it’s wound up and unleashed; Bill, on the other hand, is intrigued.
Fast forward a couple of decades and the estranged Hal and Bill (now both played by Theo James) are brought together once more when the monkey, dormant for years, suddenly comes to life and begins killing the inhabitants of their home town.
Director Osgood Perkins, who adapts King’s story, delivered an intriguing take on the serial killer genre last year with Longlegs, and you can see why he might have been attracted to The Monkey: in its inexplicably random targeting of its victims, the monkey kills as erratically as life itself.
That means anyone and everyone is a candidate for slaughter, which in turn allows for some ridiculously convoluted and blackly comic deaths; likewise, the random nature of the monkey’s method doesn’t make for especially gripping drama, and nor is the clockwork simian particularly scary in its own right.
That said, Perkins is to be applauded for offering a humorous take on Stephen King’s work, which all too often errs on the po-faced when adapted for the screen, and fans of comedy-horror will get plenty bang for their buck here.
- September Says
- ★★★☆☆
- In cinemas
September Says (15A) stars Pascale Kann as September, a belligerent teenager who is protective of her sister July (Mia Tharia) in public, but who insists on dominating July in private.
When September gets suspended from school for taking a violent revenge on the bullies tormenting July, their relationship takes a rather dark turn: already morbidly close — they have a secret language, and make death pacts – the sisters begin spiralling downwards into an abusive relationship that their mother Sheela (Rakhee Thakrar) is helpless to prevent.
Written by Daisy Johnson and adapted by Ariane Labed, with Labed directing, September Says is a stiflingly claustrophobic account of contradictory instincts in a very tight-knit family unit.
The sisters are tender and cruel to one another, emotionally and physically, and as likely to brutalise as they are to self-sacrifice on the other’s behalf.
Mia Tharia and Pascale Kann are compelling as the embattled siblings, but the storytelling is repetitive and the drama smoulders without ever sparking to life.
- I’m Still Here
- ★★★★☆
- In cinemas
Opening in Rio in 1971, I’m Still Here (12A) stars Fernanda Torres as Eunice Paiva, a wife and mother whose life is torn apart when her husband Rubens (Selton Mello), a former congressman,
is taken away by the police to ‘make a
deposition’, only to disappear into the system and vanish without trace.
Nominated for Best Picture in this year’s Oscars, Walter Salles’ drama — adapted from a memoir by Paiva’s son Marcelo — brilliantly captures the devastation of a family tossed into the maw of a dictatorship’s mincing machine.
The terror is palpable, and especially when Eunice herself, along with her teenage daughter Nalu, are dragged in for interrogation by a series of implacable, soulless investigators.
Previously a Best Actress nominee for Salles’ Central Station (1998), Fernanda Torres is nominated in the same category this year, and delivers a haunting portrait of a wounded but indefatigable woman that could very well land her the gong this time.
