Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for The Monkey (2025)
I can’t shake the idea that the тιтular threat from The Monkey somehow controls itself in one scene from the Stephen King adaptation, but I’m not sure if I’ve got that right. With 2024’s sleeper hit Longlegs, director Oz Perkins proved that he was more than a divisive indie horror auteur. His earlier efforts like I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives in this House and Gretel and Hansel left audiences cold judging by their Rotten Tomatoes scores, and these austere, cerebral horrors didn’t fare much better with critics. However, Longlegs was a mᴀssive mainstream hit.
Now, 2025’s Stephen King adaptation The Monkey has shown that Perkins can make a genuinely funny, scary, and unexpectedly life-affirming horror movie that doubles as a mainstream hit at the multiplex. The Monkey made back more than its $10 million budget in its opening weekend alone and fared well with critics who largely approved of the movie’s anarchic, Sam Raimi-inspired horror-comedy. However, while I found The Monkey’s bloody death scenes as inspired and entertaining as everyone else, I’m still confused by one plot hole that seemingly has no solution.
Bill Didn’t Kill Aunt Ida In The Monkey
Aunt Ida’s Death Precedes Bill’s Rediscovery Of The Monkey
The eponymous villain of The Monkey can’t kill people unless someone turns its key, which is pivotal to the adaptation’s plot. Although this seems to be the case in both King’s original story and the movie, Perkins’ version of The Monkey attaches more narrative significance to the key. In King’s story, the toy is cursed and death seems to follow it around, particularly if it is wound up by an unsuspecting user. In the movie version of The Monkey, Bill and Hal explicitly realize and state that the monkey is supernatural, and they understand how it operates.
Aunt Ida’s death happens before the monkey is found at the estate sale and Bill gets his hands on it.
However, the monkey’s key isn’t turned before one major death. The events of The Monkey’s twist ending are set in motion when Aunt Ida dies, thus bringing Hal back to his hometown of Casco. There, he learns that Bill has been obsessively searching for the monkey for decades, eventually buying it from Rohan Campbell’s dim-witted Ricky before using it to lure Hal and Petey to his lair. However, Aunt Ida’s death happens before the monkey is found at the estate sale and Bill gets his hands on it. The question is, who turned the monkey’s key to kill Aunt Ida?
How Did The Monkey Kill Aunt Ida?
The Monkey Seemingly Turned Its Own Key In This Instance
We know that Aunt Ida hears the music since the monkey’s drumming is what wakes her up initially. The monkey’s music continues to play softly until the moment she goes down to the basement and her elaborate death scene then starts in earnest. As such, Aunt Ida’s ridiculous death is clearly linked to the monkey’s return, which would seem to suggest that someone wound it up before her demise. However, Bill had the key, and seemingly no one else had the monkey before that point.
The monkey appears to have some autonomy since, as both Bill and Hal bitterly note at different points in the story, “It doesn’t take requests.” The monkey seemingly chooses who and when to kill after its key is turned wound, but The Monkey never explains whether the toy can fully operate on its own without the key. When Hal and Bill’s father appears in The Monkey’s opening scene, the monkey seems to set itself off key to kill the pawn shop operator, but it isn’t clear whether he turned the key before entering the store.
There is a possibility that either Hal or Bill wound the monkey before they threw it in the well.
There is a huge time jump between 1999 and 2024, so viewers have no way of knowing exactly what happened to the monkey in the intervening 15 years. There is a possibility that either Hal or Bill wound the monkey before they threw it in the well, and it never killed anyone until Aunt Ida, but this seems like something they would mention during their eventual reunion. Similarly, while it is possible that someone else could have had a key to the monkey, this is another idea that would have warranted a subplot of its own.
The Monkey Book Gave Aunt Ida A Different Death
The Original Stephen King Story Features A Less Absurd Demise
In terms of how the monkey got to Aunt Ida’s farmhouse, the Stephen King adaptation’s story adds up. The monkey can canonically teleport, and it was most likely already somewhere near the farmhouse since it vanished from the nearby well. However, the question of who turned the key before her death is left open from what I can tell. The monkey seemed to have more agency over clapping its own cymbals in the original King story, so this twist could be read as the monkey setting itself off to get back to Bill.
In the short story, Aunt Ida dies of a stroke not long before the monkey returns. There is no further explanation of how the monkey works, and her death is less explicitly linked to the toy’s return, although it is heavily implied. The monkey seems to turn its own key to kill Aunt Ida and subsequently bring Bill and Hal back together, but this is neither confirmed nor denied within the movie itself.
The Monkey’s Plot Hole Bothers Me, But The Movie Is Still Great Fun
The Monkey’s Unclear Rules Don’t Dim The Movie’s Successful Storytelling
While this sounds like a plot hole, and it doesn’t have an obvious answer that I can discern, The Monkey’s mysterious Aunt Ida death doesn’t detract from the movie’s success. The unexplained death doesn’t ruin the plot by any means or spoil any of the enjoyment, because The Monkey’s outrageous horror-comedy is built more on its creative kills and a surprisingly touching story about family and death than any cohesive lore. If anything, The Monkey’s enigmatic Aunt Ida death might reaffirm the movie’s broader perspective on life and death.
By getting hung up on how exactly the monkey operates and whether its rules make sense, viewers risk missing the broader message.
When Hal sees Death in The Monkey’s ending, he decides to go dancing with his estranged son Petey. He reacts to the senseless loss of life with a newfound joie de vivre, the same life-affirming atтιтude his mother tried to instil in him in his childhood. By getting hung up on how exactly the monkey operates and whether its rules make sense, viewers risk missing the broader message. Hal accepts that he can’t understand the vagaries of death, and The Monkey’s unsolved plot hole encourages viewers to embrace the same atтιтude of accepting the absurd and incomprehensible with a smile.
Source: Rotten Tomatoes
