“Everybody dies. Some of us peacefully and in our sleep, and some of us… horribly. And that’s life.”

So says a mom to her twin boys just after attending the funeral of their babysitter whom they both watched die in a horrible accident involving a hibachi chef and his sharp blade.

Life is random and unfair, the film tells us over and over, and sometimes darkly funny.

Loosely based on a Stephen King short story of the same name The Monkey is short on plot and not much for delving deeply into those themes, but full of creative, often hilariously droll violence and death.

Somewhere in the 1990s two twin boys, Hal and Bill Shelburn (Christian Convery as a kid, and Theo James as an adult) live with their mother (Tatiana Maslany) as their father mysteriously abandoned them. Digging through his things they find a toy monkey holding a little drum. When they turn the key inside his back it spins its drumsticks then rat-a-tats a little song.

Later that evening the monkey, sitting in the car while the boys eat hibachi with their babysitter, plays a song on its own causing that horrific death I mentioned earlier.

A few days later Hal will wind the monkey again causing more death. When the boys realize it is the monkey causing all the horror they wrap it up and throw it down a deep, dark hole.

Flash forward twenty-five years later. The brothers no longer speak to each other and Hal has an estranged son whom he only sees once a year, for Hal is terrified he’ll cause harm to come to the boy. On their annual week together Hal receives a phone call from Bill claiming some more mysterious deaths have been happening in their hometown. The monkey must have gotten out.

There isn’t much more to it than that. Hal and his son investigate. More deaths occur. Eventually, they will figure out what is happening.

It is a weirdly glib, pitch-black comedy with wild and creative deaths. This is a film that begins with a man having a harpoon shot through his gut and when it is retracted it takes his small intestine, strung out like a chain of hot dogs, with him.

It totally worked for me.