The Monkey is the Gift That Keeps On Giving

The 2025 dark comedy The Monkey is a film adaptation of Stephen King’s short story by the same title. At the center of the story are Hal and Bill, two brothers who discover a wind-up toy monkey among their father’s possessions after his disappearance. They find the monkey in a box with the words “like life” on the lid. Bill turns the key to wind up the toy monkey and after a moment it turns on and begins playing the drum attached to its body. 

Shortly thereafter, Hal and Bill’s babysitter is killed in a freak accident when she takes the boys to a hibachi restaurant and the knife slips from the chef’s hands. As it flies through the air, the blade cuts a perfect slit across Babysitter Annie’s throat. 

Hal then realizes the power of the monkey—that by winding it up, the user essentially summons the death of someone else. Hal makes a wish to the monkey to kill his brother Bill. But instead of Bill, the monkey takes the life of their mother by way of a brain aneurysm. 

Despite their best efforts to destroy the monkey, it continues to reappear in Bill and Hal’s lives. That is, until they finally manage to rid themselves of it by throwing it down a well. 

At that point, the timeline fast forwards to Bill and Hal as adults. The brothers have now become estranged from one another. Hal has a son of his own, Petey, but Hal has left the family and only sees Petey once a year in an effort to protect him from the curse of the monkey. Despite his best intentions, Hal in a sense becomes his own brand of deadbeat dad. 

Meanwhile, Bill has embarked on a lifelong quest to find the monkey and deploy its power to manifest his revenge on Hal for killing their mother. He becomes obsessed with the monkey, seeing it everywhere he looks, and finally reclaims it when it is sold in an estate sale. Once the monkey is finally back in his possession, Bill speaks to it directly, imploring the monkey to carry out the death of his brother. But as we know, the monkey doesn’t take requests, and Bill essentially goes on a killing spree in an attempt to seek vengeance on Hal. 

Hal picks up Petey for their annual weekend together, but their plans are interrupted when Hal realizes that the monkey is killing again. He makes contact with Bill and discovers that he is behind the recent killings. 

Bill, afraid to put the power of the monkey in the wrong hands, gives Hal an ultimatum: he will continue using the monkey to kill more and more people unless the monkey is passed on to Petey—because the only person who can’t die is the person who turns the key. Therefore Petey would be spared from the monkey’s slaughter, and the family lineage could continue.

The Monkey feels like Stephen King’s reckoning with his own past. King has written about his absent father as well as his issues with substance abuse. For whatever personal demons he has had to battle, King has successfully reversed at least some of the generational curses passed down from his dad. He and his wife raised their children together. He was eventually admitted to rehab for drug and alcohol abuse and has remained sober as a consequence. 

It’s also no coincidence that all of the family baggage is handed down through the male lineage, while the women are depicted as faithful matriarchs. Every day when Bill and Hal come home from school, Lois is in the kitchen preparing food for them. It hearkens back to King’s childhood and his mother’s role as the sole provider for him and his brother. 

On one hand, the story is a commentary on death and mortality. Throughout the storyline of Bill and Hal’s childhood, the emphasis remains on the question of fate and the meaning of life—does everything happen for a reason? Or are we all just spinning on a rock by random chance and waiting for our turn to die? 

One of my favorite lines from the movie comes from Bill and Hal’s mom, Lois. After Babysitter Annie’s funeral service, she sits with the boys and delivers a harsh lecture on the inevitability of death. After telling Bill and Hal that they and everyone they know is doomed to die, Lois says, “And to hell with it. Now come on, let’s go dancing.” 

But in some ways, The Monkey is perhaps doing too much at once. I got a mild case of whiplash about a third of the way through the film when Hal, now an adult, once again finds himself at the center of family conflict. Except now, Hal is a dad, and he must reckon with the fact that he is repeating the cycle of alienation and guilt that defined his relationship with his own father. The omnipotence of the monkey suddenly takes a backseat as the family dynamics come into sharper focus. 

Simultaneously, the monkey itself symbolizes the intractable and unyielding nature of death as well as the extensive devastation brought on by generational trauma. I’ve thought a lot about how these two integral pillars of the allegory can coexist without undermining one another. As much as I enjoyed watching it, I still haven’t quite managed to fully untangle these two competing messages in the film, each of which are rich enough to deserve their own exploration. 

Nevertheless, the conclusion more or less succeeds at tying up these loose ends. In their final moments of reconciliation, Hal tells Bill, “It wasn’t anybody’s fault. None of us deserved what happened to us. We just happened to be there when it did.” The fact that Hal and Bill are twins allows them to see themselves in one another, creating the conditions for them to reconcile their differences and come to terms with the hand they were dealt in life. And then Bill’s head gets blown off. 

As Hal and Petey are driving away from the house where Bill has just been killed, they see people dying left and right as a result of Bill summoning the monkey’s powers. Petey asks Hal what they should do with the monkey. Hal replies, “We keep it close. We accept that it’s ours, and we hold on tight.”

They then come across an otherworldly figure riding a white horse. The figure makes eye contact with Hal for a moment then continues on, allowing Hal and Petey to pass through unharmed. It’s as if Hal has somehow unlocked the secret and has been spared from the fate that befell the monkey’s other victims. This scene is a direct reference to Bill’s monologue where he quotes a verse from the Book of Revelation: “and behold, a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death.”

I’ve come to think of the monkey as a sort of tabula rasa upon which the user inadvertently projects their own personal failings or vices. Bill describes his understanding of the monkey and its power this way: “At the very moment [the monkey] slipped from my fingers, I suddenly knew the terrible truth about everything.” It feels like a nod to the Book of Genesis when Adam and Eve eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 

Much like King’s other stories—It and Room 1408 come to mind—the villain is rarely a single character or entity, but rather an emblem of a more abstract concept of evil. Despite my criticisms of some of King’s work, this aspect is what keeps me coming back for his stories over and over. There is always a new discovery to be made because the story mirrors the respective experience of the reader at any given moment.

Even to suggest The Monkey is overdoing it with thematic elements feels almost disingenuous, because truthfully, it’s one of my favorite kinds of films—a multifaceted story which can be perpetually deconstructed and reassessed with each turn of the kaleidoscope. The comedy, the cinematography, and the quotable script are all just icing on the cake.